ABSTRACT
With SNCC and CORE moribund and the SCLC rendered largely ineffective by the death of Martin Luther King, the direct action phase of the civil rights movement had ground to a halt by the middle of 1968. Street protests in the United States continued – the bulk of them involving young whites mobilised by continuing American intervention in southeast Asia. Black unrest did not cease either, particularly on college campuses where students demanded greater control over curricula. But what had been lost was the sense of a national movement – a relatively cohesive, focused, and inter-organisational struggle for equal rights which effectively harnessed popular, community energies in the fight against racial discrimination. In spite of the destruction of Jim Crow, major problems such as inner-city deprivation, drug abuse, rural poverty, job discrimination, unstable families and segregated schools persisted. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the waning of direct action did not signal the end of the black freedom struggle. In the last three decades of the twentieth century the fight to promote better social and economic conditions for African Americans took several forms, all of them grounded firmly in the achievements of the 1960s.
