Council) fell into this same pattern--combating mainly legal segregation. Although they pioneered different tactics-- sit-ins, boycotts, and marches, the goal was to focus attention on getting rid of Jim Crow.34 The Civil Rights movement, successfully pressured Congress and the President to enact the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Movement also brought about a fundamental shift in public opinion; de jure racial discrimination became a moral wrong for many Americans. The Civil Rights Movement by 1965 had broken the back of legal Jim Crow in the South. However, in the North, Blacks living under de facto segregation by economic and racist conditions.Segregated schools and housing were unaffected by the progress of the Civil Rights Movement.35 By the middle of 1965, the Civil Rights Movement had stalled; never recovering its momentum.36 C. Van Woodward views the failure of the Civil Rights Movement to realize its goals and its disintegration in the same myopic way he views the failure of the First Reconstruction. He points to three different events, from 1965 to 1968, to explain the disintegration of the Civil Rights Movement: riots in urban areas which created a White backlash37, the rise of racial separatism and extremism within the Civil Rights Movement and Black community, 38 and the Vietnam War which diverted White liberals' attention. Woodward's analysis fails to provide a broad perspective of why these events destroyed such astrong movement. There had been riots in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, yet these riots neither spread nor crippled the movement.39 Black separatism had been a vocal movement before 1965 in the form of the Nation of Islam.40 And mass opposition to the Vietnam War among White liberals did not pickup momentum until the late 1960's after the Civil Rights Movement had stalled. On the other hand, William Julius Wilson provides a more coherent explanation of...
