How Black Nationalism Helped Civil Rights - 991 Words

In the United States, racial tolerance in society has been a product of various struggles by civil rights groups and individuals over several decades. As racial tolerance should be a basic foundation of any society, it unfortunately had to be attained through various routes in the American society; some peaceful, while most not so much. For African Americans, tolerance through civil rights was achieved through two overlapping movements. The first type of movement was the desegregation movement, aimed at ending the separation of blacks and whites and trying to make them into one American community, such as the movement headed by Martin Luther King Jr. The other type of movement was the black nationalist movement whose aim was to empower†¦show more content†¦These black nationalists did not want to mix with the white population, and many wanted to eventually create a separate nation for African Americans. The black nationalists wanted to create a sense of black pride and un ity (Brooks.†Black Nationalism.†). Black Nationalism started in the late 1700s, starting with the American Colonization Society, or the ACS (McNeil and Mintz.†Black Nationalism and Black Power†). The ACS wanted free blacks to move to Liberia, on the western coastline of Africa. African Americans didn’t start believing in this idea until a wealthy African American man named Paul Cuffee started to support the cause (Davis and Brown. â€Å"The Antipathy of Black Nationalism.†). Another one of the early black nationalist leaders was Martin Delany, an abolitionist from the 1800s, who wanted blacks from the north to move back to Africa where they can settle back down and along with the natives and help build nation states. The African leaders needed help building countries in the devastating chaos the Europeans brought (Brooks.†Black Nationalism.†). Marcus Garvey In the 20th century, a major driving force of the black nationalist movement was the creation of black-oriented religions that fueled enmity and hatred against whites, the foremost of which was the Nation of Islam, or the NOI. The NOI was formed in the 1930s by a Detroit peddler named W.D Fard. Fard influenced a young,