My Grandfather was a part of that generation of Black men who, having served in the Second World War and gone toe-to-toe with Waffen SS units in the Ardennes during the "Battle of the Bulge", were in no mood to return to a world where any jackhole could call them n-word fifty times a day without consequence.
He attributed the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s to the following: the racialist death cult of the Nazis, which displayed the inevitable end-point of supremacist ideas, the fact that men like him were sent abroad and got to see the wider world and also, quite frankly, the affect being a young, smooth cheeked killer who took no shit had upon a once submissive psyche.
It was his view that these factors, among other large social trends, forged the less fearful generation of African American men and women who founded and peopled the various organizations that formed the core of the Civil Rights effort.
An example of right time, right conditions, right people.
DRM
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