Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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presence, encompassing sculptural modernism in

Las Vegas

Dallas

(designed by I.M.

Pei,

1965–78) and a federal local center for civic renewal in

Boston,

MA. Like the

offices they shelter, all these city halls convey urban aspirations, memory identity and

power.

Further reading

Lebovich, W. (1984)

America’s City Halls,

New York: Preservation Press.

GARY McDONOGH

City University of New York (CUNY)

Formed in 1961 from municipal institutions and serving almost 220,000 students, CUNY

includes eleven urban colleges, six

community colleges,

law, medical and graduate

rograms. Descended from the Free Academy of 1847, CUNY remained free of tuition

fees until 1973. Long the immigrants’ springboard out of poverty its student body has

evolved from an earlier dominance of mostly Jewish, leftist

intellectuals

to its current

diverse range of

African American, Arab American,

Latino

and

Asian American

opulations. As state and city funding have been slashed, however, CUNY faces

increasing pressure to balance generally open admissions with “efficient results,”

controversy polarizing university and city.

JAMES KRAUS

civic religion

religion

Civil Rights Acts

Following the

Supreme Court’s

Brown

Board of Education

decision,

Congress

began to enact legislation to protect the civil and voting rights of

African Americans

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 236

The first piece of such legislation to be enacted since Reconstruction was the

Civil

Rights Act

of 1957, which made it a federal crime to interfere with a citizen’s right to

vote. It also established the Civil Rights Commission to investigate any violations of the

new law. In 1964 in the aftermath of the March on Washington and the

assassination

President

Kennedy,

Johnson

passed a more far-reaching civil-rights bill designed to end

discrimination in employment “based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

“Sex” was added by Southern opponents of the bill in the hopes of killing it, but to their

chagrin it was passed anyway The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

was established at this time to enforce the Act.

To bolster the 1957 law protecting voting rights the 24th Amendment was ratified in

1964, banning the levying of poll taxes in federal elections. Johnson followed this up

with a Voting Rights Act in the next year, after Martin Luther

King,

Jr.’s march from

Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, which had dramatized the voting issue. Banning poll

taxes and literacy tests, the Act authorized the

Attorney-General

to send federal

examiners to register black voters whenever necessary. Within a year a quarter of a

million new black voters had been registered. The Voting Rights Act was readopted and

strengthened in 1970, 1975 and 1982.

In 1991, in the face of several reverses and a weakening of the civil-rights laws at the

hands of

Reagan

and

Bush

Supreme Court appointees,

Democrats

deemed it essential to

enact another civil-rights bill, which would make the language relating to discrimination

more explicit. More recently, gays and lesbians have been advocating for extension o

civil-rights law to include sexual preference, while in 2000 laws protecting against age

discrimination have been under assault.

ROBERT GREGG

Civil Rights movement

The Civil Rights movement spanned two decades (c.1948–68) in the historic battle for

African American

freedom in the United States. Its impacts were regional, nationwide

and international. The movement was a unique partnership among local activists, national

civil-rights organizations and the federal government, especially the federal courts. This

artnership flourished most visibly between 1948 and 1965. During those seventeen

years, the post-Reconstruction Southern system of race control was dismantled.

The movement is by far the largest interracial mass movement in American history. It

changed the basic practice of race relations in the nation. The movement brought dignity,

self-respect and national admiration to poor black people who had long been repressed

and ignored, especially in the

South

. The movement also redefined the meaning o

freedom

in America. It established the right of the individual to protection from state or

rivately instituted discrimination. More importantly, it established the obligation of the

Entries A-Z 237

federal government to serve as primary protector of individual rights.

The movement caused millions of Americans to embrace and celebrate the ideals

expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the

Bill of Rights

and the “equal

protection” clause of the 14th Amendment. For the first time in national history a

significant majority of the people believed the goals of freedom, justice and equality for

all could be realized. While it would not fulfill the expectations of many especially

among African Americans, the movement still eradicated permanently the national

acceptance of overt racist assumptions and practices.

Haphazard, erratic and disruptive throughout its course, its leadership often divided in

conflict; nevertheless the movement managed to articulate certain commonly shared

goals. Most central were the elimination of Jim Crow

segregation

and black

disenfranchisement in the former Confederate States. These specific goals determined the

origins, strategies and tactics of the movement during its most active phase.

The movement emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War because of changes

in the African American population, in the Federal Government and in international

affairs. Hundreds of thousands of black Americans had migrated to northern

cities

where

they could vote, while enjoying lessened discrimination and better employment. Tens o

thousands of black men had fought in the War and experienced the liberating influences

of new, less racist environments. They and their families were no longer willing to suffer

the institutionalized terror of Southern white racism. During this same era, the Depression

and the War had increased the scope and size of the federal government. Most

importantly the national government had evolved an expanding role as protector o

citizen rights, primarily in the economic arena up to 1945. With the coming of the

Cold

War,

the United States claimed leadership of the “Free World,” competing with the

Soviet bloc for the allegiance of the underdeveloped, predominantly colored nations o

the world. America’s treatment of its own citizens of color was believed to be a potential

determining factor in this international contest.

The convergence of these larger socio-

olitical forces ignited the movement and a

series of dramatic episodes ultimately resulting in landmark civil-rights legislation. The

desegregation of the military in 1948 is less renowned than the later

Brown

decision o

the

Supreme Court,

a case brought by the

NAACP

. Nonetheless, military desegregation

incorporated all the forces that came to work in the movement for the next decades and,

like them, had consequences far broader than anticipated. President

Truman’s

executive

order integrating the armed services coincided with efforts by liberal Democrats to attract

new black voters in northern cities. The Cold War necessitated a large, standing military

Black men were needed as career soldiers, but they would not submit to the racist

treatment that had previously characterized the military. Much of the newly integrated

force was stationed in the South, undermining the racial mores of the surrounding

segregated communities. As veterans re-entered the civilian sector, many of the whites

rought with them new acceptance of African Americans as coworkers, even supervisors,

and many of the blacks developed new self-confidence and assertiveness in integrated

settings.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 238

The Montgomery Bus Boycott resulted in further evolution of the local black

activist/federal government alliance and revealed the basic strategy of the movement. The

targets for change would be southern segregation and voter discrimination. This strategy

enabled movement activists to appeal to the majority of white Americans who lived

outside the South. The movement’s demands were presented simply as appeals to basic

constitutional rights guaranteed to all. Participants in the movement also invoked the

rhetoric of Christian salvation for this secular cause. Thus the movement incorporated

two of the strongest impulses in the American character—

elief in democratic principles

and in Protestant Christianity.

The tactic of non-violent, direct action challenged Southern segregation and

disenfranchisement as protesters refused to obey manifestly “unjust laws.” Leaders (for

example, Martin Luther

King,

Jr., Ralph

Abernathy,

James

Farmer

and Bayard

Rustin

)

skillfully used the media, especially

television,

to contrast the dignity and righteousness

of the abused demonstrators with the brutal and profane behavior of white

police

and

citizenry Through the boycott of city

buses

department stores,

local black activists

utilized economic pressure to divide the white community while energizing and giving a

sense of empowerment to their

working-class

supporters.

In the original bus boycott, victory resulted from a combination of the municipal

surrender to black demands and the federal court decision outlawing segregated buses.

Sit-ins and withholding of patronage led to gradual desegregation of some chain stores.

The

Freedom Rides

of the early 1960s ultimately provoked the intervention of the

federal courts and the Justice Department, even though they could not immediately end

segregation in interstate transportation, and, throughout the 1950s, Southern

public

schools

remained overwhelmingly segregated.

The high-water mark of the Civil Rights era—the March on Washington on August 28,

1963—epitomized the movement’s strengths and weaknesses. It was a magnificent

spectacle. Two hundred thousand black and white Americans joined together peacefully

rofessing shared social and religious visions and demanding specific reform that they

elieved would ennoble all Americans and provide a model to the rest of the world. There

were, however, many discordant voices at the march. Many complained that the declared

goals were too circumscribed, that African Americans needed protection from

de facto

discrimination and economic impoverishment in the North, as well as from

de jure

segregation in the South. Local leaders complained that the march had been co-opted by

the nationally heralded leaders and white authorities.

No concrete change followed immediately from the march. In fact, some Southern

opponents redoubled their efforts to defeat civil-rights reform. Nevertheless, the

partnership embodied by the march prevailed. Within two years, the first significant civil-

rights legislation since 1876 was enacted: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting

Rights Act of 1965.

After these legislative successes, the movement began to dissipate for several reasons.

Most important was that many whites in the civil-rights partnership, including those in

the federal government, believed that the principal goals of the movement had been

Entries A-Z 239

achieved. Segregation in public accommodations was outlawed, the courts had been

empowered to force school desegregation and the Justice Department could now

intervene to guarantee fair elections throughout the South. Because of the movement’s

achievements, the demand for equality was taken up in northern black

ghettos,

among

the poor, women, gays and lesbians and other national minorities. But opponents o

change became better organized and effective, using the movement’s techniques in their

struggles, for example, to end

busing

abortion

. At the same time, white liberals

redirected much of their energies to opposing the war in

Vietnam

. They also experienced

confusion and anger at the rise of black cultural nationalism among African Americans

despondent at the nation’s failure to create a non-racist society.

Despite unfulfilled goals, the Civil Rights movement demonstrated the power o

ordinary citizens to force permanent change when societal circumstances and the courage

of both common people and their leaders converge to achieve an end. The movement

transformed the meaning of freedom nationally and internationally. It established that

governments are responsible for guaranteeing the rights of their citizens and that they

may be legitimately resisted when they do not. Within the United States, the movement

ended the right of white people to publicly humiliate black people. It invalidated claims

to privilege based on color. It altered the basic practice of race relations, if not always the

asic prejudices underneath. It has inspired freedom movements abroad from Eastern

Europe to South Africa to

China

. The movement clearly sparked determined resistance

to continued change by privileged elites in America. Nevertheless, the movement

transformed and elevated Americans’ expectations of themselves. That may be its most

lasting consequence.

Further reading

Eagles, C. (ed.) (1986)

The Civil Rights Movement in America,

Oxford: University Press

of Mississippi.

King, R. (1996)

Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom,

Athens: University of Georgia

Press.

Sitkoff, H. (1981)

The Struggle for Black Equality,

New York: Hill&Wang.

ROBERT FRANCIS ENGS

Clark, Dick

music, popular; television

class

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 240

Paul Fussell, in his wry analysis of class markers and behaviors, cites a woman who,

asked by interviewers if she thought there were social classes in America, answered “It’s

the dirtiest thing I’ve ever heard of.” Divisions by class, sometimes expressed in terms o

race

ethnicity,

pose fundamental problems for a nation based on premises of liberty

equality and justice for all. In fact, while such divisions clearly exist in the US, as in all

industrial/ post-industrial societies, the unique feature of American class is its consistent

denial in public rhetoric. Narratives of upward

mobility

—the classic Horatio Alger story

after a nineteenthcentury popular children’s who specialized in rags to riches tales—are

seen as proven in each generation by entrepreneurs, celebrities and even presidents, from

Abraham Lincoln to Bill

Clinton

. When asked about their own class position, in turn,

most Americans will identify themselves as

middle class,

whether they are poor or rich.

In doing so, many Americans deny class as a system, and will find issues relating to

sexuality drugs, race and

religion

easier topics to address in news and social gatherings.

However, this denial hides a deep status anxiety about falling out of the middle class or

eing overtaken and supplanted by rising social groups, which has often animated

American politics.

When discussed, class is treated in the generally Weberian sense of status (or

consumption), rather than in relation to a Marxist framework of political economics and

power (for example, Vance Packard’s (1959)

The Status Seekers

). Studies of class, in

fact, have often been diffused by an ideological construction of a classless society and

have tended to use this construction as the basis for assuming that the “American

experience” is “exceptional.” For example, David Potter embodied such assumptions in a

chapter title from the

People of Plenty

(1954), simply “Abundance, Mobility and Status.”

These assumptions were widely held in the 1950s period of suburbanization and rapid

economic growth, and still retain a strong hold in American political and cultural

discourses.

Attacks on those who have concentrated and reproduced American social and

economic power, from slave-owners to robber barons, often have centered on the

violation of this classlessness rather than any sense of an ongoing struggle between

classes (which might have been classified as communist during the

Cold War

). Studies

that revealed the stratification of American society, like William Lloyd Warner’s (1963)

Yankee City

or C. Wright Mills’ (1951)

White Collar,

also focused on a wide range o

features to define class, including housing,

education

and heritage. Moreover, such

works did not pose an attack on the classes per se. Instead, as Warner’s

Social Class in

merica

noted, they were intended as “corrective instruments,” permitting “men and

women better to evaluate their social situations and thereby better adapt themselves to

social reality and fit their dreams and aspirations to what is possible” (1949:5).

This sense of class means that political economic reform focuses on mediation rather

than systemic analysis or conflict. That is, attacks on the rich stress obligations or

deviations rather than structural polarizations, ignoring and ensuring the reproduction o

class through economic and social capital. Reforms for the poor seek to bring them into

the middle class rather than change a system that demands unemployment and low-wage

Entries A-Z 241

work in order to survive. For those in between, adapting to class rather than changing it

becomes the norm. The assumption is that Americans need to have “the hidden injuries o

class” (see R.Sernett and J. Cobb’s (1972) book with the same title) revealed to them;

they are not self-evident and nor do they form the basis of strong class consciousness.

Even oppositional

intellectuals

have tended to diminish class in their analyses. The

New

Left

intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s discussed the emergence of corporate

capitalism and showed how other elements in society from the middle class

organization

man

” to working-class trade

unions,

were brought into the corporate consensus. The

only opposition that could be hoped for, they argued, would be countercultural rather

than anti-capitalist. Similarly feminists in the same period described the American

consensus in terms of patriarchy and tended to underestimate the extent to which class

(and

race)

differences would divide the feminist movement.

frican American

intellectuals, focusing on race, have also tended to ignore class on

both sides of the racial divide. The

civil-rights

movement seemed to suggest that blacks

could be integrated into a mainstream, which was often defined in a uniform, classless

way Black nationalists, meanwhile, talked in terms of a similarly uniform white society

from which blacks needed to remain separate. Class divisions among African Americans

have also been overlooked; the overriding tendency has been to define black communities

in singular ways, characterized by the

ghetto

and the “Black Church.” That African

American communities have been sites of great divisions, has been evident since

W.E.B.

Du Bois’

(1899)

The Philadelphia Negro

. Yet, where recognized, intra-racial

antagonisms and stratification have also adopted a language of status (religion, color,

gender and occupation) rather than that of class.

Similarly, calls for multiculturalism which recognize that society has moved beyond a

strict biracial system have also deflected attention from class. While blacks may remain

as a politically and economically constructed lower class, the sense of caste and status

embodied in the term “ethnicity” has taken on ironic overtones as non-Asian Americans

explain

Asian American

success. Clearly demarcated ethnic groups, while bringing

different cultural practices to the fore from those of WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon

Protestant) culture, will often be seen to be pushing for better status rather than

highlighting potential social conflict. Moreover, in

gender

and class terms, what

particular ethnic groups may project about themselves (for example, “strong” families

and economically successful members of the community) may be very similar to those to

whom they wish to be compared. Finally, in this area it is important to note that the

commonly applied system of redressing past wrongs, namely

affirmative action,

undertaken using the language of race and minorities rather than class.

Consumption patterns have also complicated class. While

fashion, automobiles,

housing, education,

language

and style all convey differences, many tokens of status are

also taken to be accessible on the basis of money or work, especially in an age o

affluence and global power. Hence, elitist associations with an

Ivy League

education are

diminished somewhat by the belief that high grades and financial aid may make such

opportunities available to the non-wealthy while the same associations attached to clothes

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 242

and style may be balanced by individual taste and discount shopping. Nevertheless, more

complex differences indicate the perdurance of class formation. Those who vacation in

Europe during college breaks or those who throw together Chanel and Prada to make

their fashion statements lay claim to different class positions from those who have to

“make do.”

ass media

also mystify discussions of class. In the aftermath of the death of John

Kennedy,

Jr., for example, the news media were caught between a justification for

devoting so much airtime to the accident because he was “like royalty” and their

insistence that he was a “regular guy” or the nation’s son. In the process, the facts that he

was a grandson of one of the wealthiest men in the country and the stepson of one of the

wealthiest men in the world, Aristotle Onassis, were lost. Discussing class origins and

attributes (including the fact that he was flying his own private plane), would have

seemed un-American in public discourse, which presumed the world would know about

celebrity

vacation spots like Martha’s Vineyard.

Even where one might find class most noticeable, in the discussion of poverty it may

be explained away in terms of moral failure, a “culture of poverty” or a problematic

underclass

. The lower classes, it is argued, are where they are, not because of structural

impediments brought about by capitalism, but simply because they are not working hard

enough, focusing on sex or games, or the drinking class as a state of grace. One notes this

Reagan

era debates over aid to the worthy poor that presumes everyone who wants to

work can do so, which spawned the 1990s

welfare reform

. This reform also underscores

an insidious gendering of class in a society where women must work and also be

responsible for childcare without support (explored by Katherine Newman (1999) in

alling from Grace

As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in the 1950s, witnessing the rise of

McCarthyism,

American politics have been animated by deep-seated status anxiety translating at times

into paranoia. Populist anxieties about the emergence of a class-ridden society dominated

y industrialists and peopled by immigrant masses carried over into fears associated with

the communist menace and/or the advancement of African Americans. Kevin Phillips

suggested that such sentiments formed the backbone of the emerging Republican

majority and the conservative

backlash

witnessed with the election of

Nixon

and

crystallized in the Reagan era. But such fears once again turned socio-economic

differences into cultural differences. “Americanness” was attached to the notion of a

“Silent Majority” and any vocal opposition was once again made to seem un-American.

But this would not end altogether the politics of class, or “the politics of rich and

poor” (as Phillips called it). In times of economic hardship, as American society becomes

increasingly bifurcated between employees within high-tech industries and service

workers eking out a poverty-level subsistence, the politics of class resurface. But, at the

moment they make any impression, as with Bill

Clinton’s

first election when there

seemed to be a mandate for “change,” they are channeled, defused and denied.

In sum, Americans do recognize class difference, but express them in other terms,

which may nonetheless have political and economic foundations. Some entail race—

Entries A-Z 243

classifications and explanations on the basis of perceived skin color. Others are tied to

immigration

and recent arrival in the US. Yet, the ideological constructions used to

explain away class must be measured against stark realities not only of division, but o

increasing polarization embodied in dual cities and permanent marginality as well as

lutocratic elites whose fortunes run into the billions. Moreover, analysts decade by

decade, from Warner to Packard to Fussell and Newman, have underscored the anxiety

Americans have about maintaining and losing status. Not talking about class will not

make it go gently away.

ee also:

middle class; upper class; working class; “underclass”