The Evolution of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in America, Essay Example

Issues of civil rights and liberties are not matters that arose within America, but are within the founding of the United States itself. They are also manifested in very different ways, and not always reflective of an American appreciation of them.

Schoolchildren are still taught today that America was settled chiefly because British Puritans were fleeing religious persecution in their native land. In a very real sense, they began to found a nation only to ensure civil liberties. This is not completely untrue, yet it does not address the intolerant nature of the New England settlements themselves, nor does it reflect how many other kinds of immigrants were utterly denied civil liberties, and from those colonial days: “In colonial America, many Germans began as indentured servants, working for years to pay off the cost of their passage across the Atlantic” (Sowell, 43). Virtually all European immigrants settling in early America were, at best, second-class citizens, and achieved civil rights only through long years of usually patient assimilation.

More commonly accepted today is the troubling fact that even the earliest American settlers were not merely settlers; they were conquerors, as well, and the civil liberties of the Native Americans in place before them were famously ignored. As regards Native Americans and the  treatment of them by the new U.S. government, it could be said that civil liberties were a luxury to be pursued, since outright slaughter and the taking of their lands was the order of the day. Even centuries later, Native American rights have been ignored or barely acknowledged: “While the religious clauses of the First Amendment apply in theory in full force…to Native American religions, the application of these provisions has often resulted in little actual protection…” (Finkelman, 1077).

Meanwhile, as America grew into a powerful nation, its inherently immigrant populations found very different paths to obtaining their civil liberties. In the northeast, primarily European immigrants from Italy and Ireland, driven from their homes by famine, fully accepted the blatant discrimination they faced, both in the laws and in mainstream living. These people had, however, an advantage; immigrant status is invisible, and they were white. A denial of their civil rights would last only as long as they were, temporarily, viewed as newcomers, because the historic and enduring issues in civil liberties are mostly racially driven. “Immigrant status…is a social construction. It is not immutable, and it is not fixed by biology” (Johnson, 6).

This factor of race has been the dominant element in the struggle for civil rights within virtually every minority population in America. There are, admittedly, others, as women, and then gay people, have more recently fought for legislation ensuring equal pay and equal protections and benefits under the law. These conflicts are, however, more socially based. The greater reality of civil rights in America is that its evolution is typically slow, and only occurring in a meaningful way when racial factors are finally viewed as irrelevant to what real civil liberties are about.

No more striking example of this exists than the African American experience in America. Brought in through slavery, it has taken literally hundreds of years for the U.S. government, in concert with its culture and societies, to acknowledge basic civil rights as necessary for this population. The process has been marked by violence, which will happen when a population deprived of its liberties feels that it has no other means of being heard and recognized.

It is both interesting and unfortunate to observe that the lesson always seems to need to be learned again, as Latin Americans today struggle to overcome discriminatory practices that hinder their rights and deny them opportunities. In spite of a founding ideology based upon human rights and civil liberties, and despite many and violent consequences of the denial of such rights,  America’s history remains one of a reluctance to legally grant to all its citizens its proudest claim to greatness.

Works Cited

Finkelman, P. The Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006, Print.

Johnson, K. R. The ‘Huddled Masses’ Myth: Immigration and Civil Rights. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004. Print.

Sowell, T. Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1984. Print.