Social Movements American society produces numerous

American society produces numerous social movements to address perceived problems affecting segments of the population or the population as a whole. An examination of the general development of social movements and of the leadership and membership of three current social movements--the Black Power movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the Pro-life movement--will serve to show the nature, development, and perhaps future of these movements. For a social movement to occur, the following must take place:

1) some members of society must share a grievance they want to correct;

2) they must have hope and think there is a possibility of success;

3) there is often a precipitating event that ignites these grievances and convinces the people that the time for action has arrived;

4) people are recruited through a network of attachments.

For a social movement to succeed, the following must occur:

1) it must achieve an effective mobilization of people and resources;

2) it must withstand or overcome external opposition;

3) the fate of the movement depends on enlisting external allies from other major groups;

4) the movement will tend to be embodied in several separate organizations which may cooperate but which often compete vigorously.

Stewart, Smith, and Denton (1989) further identify a social movement as having at least minimal organization, meaning we can identify leaders, membership, and one or more organizations.

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989, 46). One of the most important movements of the time was the Nation of Islam. Martin Luther King Jr. was the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, and Malcolm X would become the leader and icon of the Black Nationalist movement as spokesperson for the Nation of Islam. He was a minister for the Nation of Islam and preached a message of black nationhood that appealed to a far broader audience. He saw separatism as self-determination and criticized reliance on whites to achieve black progress (Hampton & Fayer, 1990, 163). Black nationalism has its conservative and its liberal side. The separatist strand hopes for an American society made up of semi- or fully-independent racial enclaves, each based on its own cultural definitions (Bush, 1984, 209). There is some dispute about the early history of the Nation of Islam, but the official version holds that Wallace D. Fard founded it in Detroit in 1930, allegedly upon arriving from Mecca. He disappeared a few years later and was replaced by Elijah Poole, renamed Elijah Muhammad, who ruled until 1975 over a black nationalist business and religious empire. The sect has long been riven by factionalism, and the most celebrated split was the 1964 departure of Malcolm X, who tur

Category: History - S