Changing Your Company from the Inside Out

CHAPTER THREE

Overview of the Social Movement Framework

The March on Washington for Jobs and Justice on August 28, 1963, was a high-water mark of the American civil rights movement. Hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered around the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. share his dream. Within two years, the central pillars of the American apartheid system that had stood for nearly a century crumbled. The federal government stepped in to strike down legalized racial discrimination, from mundane exclusionary practices at hotels and restaurants to wholesale disenfranchisement of African American voters. The victories of the civil rights movement signaled that even long-standing inequities ...