The Gay Rights Movement
Until 1973, homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Police regularly raided gay clubs/bars, and harassed gay Americans. Attitudes began to change slowly in the mid 20th century. Sociologist Alfred Kinsey published a report revealing that homosexuality is far more widespread than was commonly believed. Several gay rights organizations were formed in the 1950’s, initially trying to decriminalize homosexual acts performed between consenting adults in private.
It was the Stonewall riots that transformed the gay rights movement into widespread protest for equal rights and acceptance. In June 1969, police raided the bar; a crowd of 400 patrons gathered and watched the arrests. An estimated 2000 fought back by chanting “Gay Power!” and throwing beer bottles and trash cans. Police and protesters clashed and the riots continued for three days. Most Gay Pride celebrations happen on or around Stonewall’s Anniversary.
Harvey Milk of San Francisco became the first openly gay man to be elected into public office in 1977. In 1978 he was sworn in as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk Also led the fight against the Proposition 6, also known as the Briggs Amendment, which would have allowed any school employee who was gay or supported gay rights to be fired. He attended every event hosted by Briggs and voters eventually rejected it by more than a million votes. Milk and the Mayor of San Francisco were assassinated by Dan White, a former fellow supervisor. Although White confessed to the two murders, a jury found him guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter and he served only five years in prison.
When Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency, he promised to revoke the prohibition against gays in the military. However, upon his election he was met with opposition. The resulting policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell, was meant to be a compromise between the two sides but put many servicemen in a difficult position. According to the policy, military officials would not ask a person’s sexual orientation but service members who were gay were not allowed to publically admit to being so. If “outed,” military members would be discharged. When the policy was in effect, over 13,000 servicemen were discharged. The policy was repealed during the Obama administration in 2011.
In 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, was kidnapped, tortured, and tied to a fence for 18 hours in near-freezing temperatures by 2 men in Wyoming. He died five days later. The killers said they suffered from “gay panic defense.” They were both sentenced to life in prison. In 2009 the Matthew Shepard Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. It expanded the Federal Hate Crime to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
Currently the gay rights movement has turned its attention to the issue of gay marriage. The federal government offers 1,138 rights to married couples. These include tax benefits, the right to spousal health and death benefits, the right to make decisions as the spouse’s next of kin, rights of inheritance, and rights relating to child custody issues. Gay rights activists argue that denying the right of same-sex couples to marry violates their 14th amendment right to equal protection under the law as they do not have the same access to these benefits as heterosexual couples. In the Supreme Court hearings regarding California’s Prop 8, a voter initiative that declared that only marriages between a man and a woman are valid, Justice Sotomayor asked the following question to Charles Cooper, a lawyer defending the ban.
Sotomayor “Outside of the marriage context, can you think of any other rational basis, reason, for a state using sexual orientation as a factor in denying homosexual’s benefits or imposing burdens on them? Is there any other rational decision-making that the government could make? Denying them a job, not granting them benefits of some sort, any other decision?”
Cooper: “Your Honor, I cannot. I do not have any — anything to offer you in that regard.”
The map at right shows states that allow and prohibit same-sex marriage as of February 2014.
Disability Rights Movement
Americans with disabilities are a group of approximately 50 million people that today lead independent lives, but that has not always been the case. People with disabilities have had to battle against harmful stereotypes, and irrational fears. The stigmatization of disability left people with disabilities in a state of poverty and dependence on others for centuries. In the 1800s, people with disabilities were considered unable to contribute to society,
except as ridiculed objects of entertainment in circuses and exhibitions.
They were assumed to be abnormal and feeble-minded, and some were forced to undergo sterilization. People with disabilities were also forced to enter institutions and asylums, where many spent their entire lives. Even our first disabled president, Franklin Roosevelt believed that his disability was an abnormal, shameful condition. He hid his disability, never appearing in his wheelchair in public.
Disabled World War II veterans made disability issues more visible to a country of thankful citizens who were concerned for the long-term welfare of young men who sacrificed their lives to secure the safety of the United States. But despite small advancements made towards independence and self-reliance, people with disabilities still did not have access to public transportation, telephones, bathrooms and stores. Office buildings and worksites with stairs offered no entry for people with disabilities who sought employment, and employer attitudes created even worse barriers. People with disabilities were locked out of opportunities for meaningful work.
By the 1960’s disability rights activists started to mobilize in the same manner as other minority groups. They demanded laws to address the physical and social barriers. Parents demanded their children be taken out of institutions and asylums, and placed into public schools where they could have the same opportunities as other children.
In 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act was passed to guarantee equal access to public education for children with disabilities. This act of legislation specified that every child had a right to education, and required the full inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream education classes, unless a satisfactory level of education could not be achieved due to the nature of the child’s disability. In 1990 the law was expanded into the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which further stressed the inclusion of children with disabilities into regular classes, but also focused on the rights of parents to be involved in the educational decisions affecting their children. IDEA required that an Individual Education Plan be designed with parental approval to meet the educational needs of a child with a disability.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990. Under the ADA, businesses were required to provide reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities (such as restructuring jobs or modifying work equipment), public services could no longer deny services to people with disabilities (such as public transportation systems) and all places that served the public were expected to have modifications made to be accessible to people with disabilities. With this piece of legislation, the US government identified the full participation, inclusion and integration of people with disabilities in all levels of society.
People with disabilities still face prejudice and bias with the stereotypical portrayal of people with disabilities in the movies and in the media, physical barriers to schools, housing and to voting stations. The promise of the ADA is yet to be fully realized, but the disability rights movement continues to make great strides towards the empowerment and self-determination of Americans with disabilities.
Native American Rights
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new spirit of political action arose among the first Americans, just as it had among other minority groups. No other group, however, faced problems more severe than Native Americans. Throughout the 1960s, American Indians were the nation's poorest minority group. In 1970, the Indian unemployment rate was 10 times the national average, and 40 percent of the Native American population lived below the poverty line. In that year, Native American life expectancy was just 44 years, a third less than that of the average American. Deaths caused by pneumonia, hepatitis, dysentery, strep throat, diabetes, tuberculosis, alcoholism, suicide, and homicide were 2 to 60 times higher than the entire U.S. population. Half a million Indian families lived in unsanitary, dilapidated dwellings, many in shanties, huts, or even abandoned automobiles.
In 1961, a militant new Indian organization, the National Indian Youth Council, appeared and began to use the phrase "Red Power." They sponsored demonstrations, marches, and "fish-ins" to protest state efforts to abolish Indian fishing rights guaranteed by federal treaties. At the same time, the Native American Rights Fund brought legal suits against states that had taken Indian land and abolished Indian hunting, fishing, and water rights in violation of federal treaties. Many tribes also took legal action to prevent strip mining or spraying of pesticides on Indian lands.
The best known of all Indian Power groups was the American Indian Movement (AIM), formed by a group of Chippewas in Minneapolis in 1966 to protest alleged police brutality. In the fall of 1972, AIM led Indians of all backgrounds along the “Trail of Broken Treaties' to Washington, D.C., took over the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., and occupied them for a week in order to dramatize Indian grievances. In the spring of 1973, a group of 200 heavily armed Indians took over the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota--site of an 1890 massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. Army cavalry. The group of armed Indians occupied the town for 71 days.
In November 1969, some 200 Native Americans took over the abandoned federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. For 19 months, Indian activists occupied the island to draw attention to conditions on the nation's Indian reservations. Alcatraz, the Native Americans said, symbolized conditions on reservations: "It has no running water; it has inadequate sanitation facilities; there is no industry, and so unemployment is very great; there are no health care facilities; the soil is rocky and unproductive." The activists, who called themselves Indians of All Tribes, offered to buy Alcatraz from the federal government for "$24 in glass beads and red cloth."
Militant protests paid off. Several laws were passed in the 1970’s which gave Indian parents greater control over their children's schools; addressed deficiencies in Indian health care; and gave tribes control over custody decisions involving Indian children. A series of landmark Supreme Court decisions aided the cause of Indian sovereignty and tribal self- government. The Menominee Tribe v. United States (1968) case declared that states could not invalidate fishing and hunting rights that Indians had acquired through treaty agreements. Court decisions also permitted tribal authorities to sell cigarettes, run gambling casinos, and levy taxes.
Recent issues have focused on the continuing use of racist Native American Caricatures and names in sports. Although many schools and colleges have been willing to adopt more racially sensitive mascots, professional sports teams have been less willing to do so. In May, 2014 the Los Angeles Times published an editorial regarding the NFL team, The Washington Redskins. It stated
“The team has been called the Redskins [for] 77 years; we don't think a team called the "Darkies" would have been tolerated for that long, although there's really not much difference. The team's owners have complained over the years that renaming the team would anger fans and make meaningless the millions of dollars that have been spent marketing the team. To which we respond: It's past time for a change. Cut your losses.
We should note too that the NFL, as a business association, is tax exempt which means American taxpayers are an unwilling party to this embarrassment. This page has argued before that Snyder should drop the offensive name, and we renew that call now. Change the name, and end the insult.”
Asian-American Rights
Many different groups from Asia had a long history in America. All shared a history of various forms of discrimination and marginalization. Since start of the 1900’s, strict quotas limited the number of Asian, but not European immigrants. Due to racism and stereotyping, most were not given the opportunity to work in profitable occupations.
It was not until the 1960’s that the Asian-American Rights movement -- which initially united Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino Americans, and then expanded to include Koreans, Southeast and South Asians, and Pacific Islanders—was formed. It was driven largely by student activists radicalized by anti-Vietnam war and inspired by black power movements. Their goals were originally to overturn stereotypes about Asian "passivity", and rejecting the stereotypical “oriental” label, Asian American activists eventually mobilized this new solidarity to demand an end to racist hiring practices, biased school curricula, demeaning media stereotypes, and residential discrimination.
Black activism played a fundamental part in the launch of the Asian-American Civil Rights Movement. A founding member of the Black Panther Party—Richard Aoki—was Japanese American. A military veteran who spent his early years in an internment camp, Aoki donated weapons to the Black Panthers and trained them in their use.
Like Aoki, a number of Asian-American civil rights activists were Japanese American internees or the children of internees. The decision of President Franklin Roosevelt to place more than 110,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II had a detrimental impact on the community. Interned based on the assumption that they were still loyal to the Japanese empire, Japanese Americans strove to prove that they were authentically American by assimilating. Yet, they continued to face discrimination. Speaking out about it, however, felt risky considering their past treatment.
When not only blacks but Latinos and Asian Americans from various ethnic groups began to share their experiences of oppression, anger replaced fear about the consequences of speaking out. Asian Americans on college campuses demanded a curriculum representative of their histories. Activists also sought to preserve Asian American neighborhoods.
“The more we examined our collective histories, the more we began to find a rich and complex past. And we became outraged at the depths of the economic, racial and gender exploitation that had forced our families into roles as subservient cooks, servants or coolies, garment workers and prostitutes, and which also improperly labeled us as the ‘model minority’ comprised of ‘successful’ businessmen, merchants or professionals,” explained activist Gordon Lee in a 2003 Hyphen magazine piece called “The Forgotten Revolution.”