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Forgive me if the facts are wrong, I'm just going by what I can find on the internet.

The Bobster wrote;

The civil rights movement in America was nonviolent under Dr King, the man I quoted in the OP. It became violent with the formation of The Black Panthers, and the rhetoric of Malcomb, "by any means necessary," X - and the fact that progress in this area stalled shortly afterwards, to say nothing of the last few generations of social problems experienced by the black comunity (rampant drug abuse, absurd levels of unemployment, gangs) says a lot about which strategy was more efficacious.

If that�s the case why was the civil rights act signed into being one year after the formation of the Black Panthers, while the timeline of the civil rights movement seems to have begun in 1954?

May 17 1954
The Supreme Court rules on the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans., unanimously agreeing that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. The ruling paves the way for large-scale desegregation. The decision overturns the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that sanctioned "separate but equal" segregation of the races, ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." It is a victory for NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, who will later return to the Supreme Court as the nation's first black justice.


April 19 1967
Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), coins the phrase "black power" in a speech in Seattle. He defines it as an assertion of black pride and "the coming together of black people to fight for their liberation by any means necessary." The term's radicalism alarms many who believe the civil rights movement's effectiveness and moral authority crucially depend on nonviolent civil disobedience.


April 11 1968
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/civilrightstimeline1.html



Political activism and drug and gang related violence are not the same things.

[it's full of stars]

In the case of Ireland;

The Irish Revolution (1919-22)
In January 1919 the Sinn Fein members of Parliament assembled in Dublin as the Dail Eireann, or national assembly. Proclaiming the independence of Ireland, the Dail forthwith formed a government, with Eamon De Valera as president. There followed guerrilla attacks by Irish insurgents, later called the Irish Republican Army (IRA), on British forces, particularly the Royal Irish Constabulary, called the Black and Tans; and the British instituted vigorous reprisals. In the course of the war, the British Parliament enacted, in December 1920, a Home Rule Bill, providing separate parliaments for six counties of Ulster Province and for the remainder of Ireland. By the terms of the bill, Great Britain retained effective control of Irish affairs. The people of Northern Ireland, as the six counties in Ulster Province were known, ratified the legislation in May 1921 and elected a parliament. Although the rest of Ireland also elected a parliament in May, the Sinn Feiners, constituting an overwhelming majority outside of Ulster, refused to recognise the other provisions of the Home Rule Bill. The warfare against the British continued until July 10, 1921, when a truce was arranged. Subsequent negotiations led to the signing, in December 1921, of a peace treaty by representatives of the second Dail Eireann and the British government. By the terms of the treaty, all of Ireland except the six counties constituting Northern Ireland was to receive dominion status identical with that of Canada. After considerable debate, in which the opposition, led by De Valera, objected strenuously to a provision that virtually guaranteed a separate government in Northern Ireland and to an article that required members of the Dail to swear allegiance to the British sovereign, the Dail ratified the treaty on January 15, 1922, by a vote of 64 to 57. Ratification brought into being the Irish Free State, with Arthur Griffith as president and Michael Collins, who was another prominent member of Sinn Fein, as chairman of the provisional government.
http://www.iol.ie/~dluby/history.htm

I think you should note that the modern State of Ireland was born out of conflict and the talking was arrived at after the use of arms. Not because the Irish made a pot of tea and invited the nice British gentlemen over and said we have an interesting proposal for you.

[it's full of stars]

So that leads us into Northern Ireland and the use of force there. Remember that I expressly said I don�t agree with the use of indiscriminate terrorism. When the Civil Rights movement started in Northern Ireland it began with the aim of peaceful inclusive political change, all political parties and sections of the community. Unfortunately using that means of expression was soon to prove impossible.


Here are the origins of the Civil Rights movement as described on NICRA (Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association) website.

ORIGINS
In 1962 the IRA decided to hang up its guns. A five year guerilla campaign of violence had produced a handful of dead bodies on both sides, a marked increase in the number of people in prison and a strengthening of the Unionist political system. It was a campaign which had been fought and lost on the bleak hillsides of South Armagh and South Derry far away geographically from the city of Belfast and far removed from the mainstream of Northern politics.
But para-military failure laid the basis for political success inside the Republican Movement, and in the light of changing political attitudes and events in Ireland, the Republican approach to Northern politics became political for the first time in forty years. The same year the Connolly Association in London published its pamphlet "Our Plan to End Partition" in which it was pointed out that "the greatest obstacle to turning out the Brookeborough Government is the way it has barricaded itself at Stormont behind a mountain of anti-democratic legislation."

CAMPAIGN FOR DEMOCRACY IN ULSTER
In pursuit of their aims the Connolly Association sought pledges of candidates in the 1964 general election that they would press for democratic reform in Northern Ireland. A follow-up conference on the issue in 1965 eventually led to the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, a loose alliance of Labour MPs spearheaded by Fenner Brockway and Paul Rose. Meanwhile back in Ireland the Wolfe Tone Societies, a group of Associations formed to commemorate the bi-centenary of Theobald Wolfe Tone in 1963, had decided to stay in existence to attempt to influence cultural and political trends in the country. The strongest groups were in Belfast and Dublin and they too became concerned with the weakening of the Unionist monolith at Stormont through democratic action.
Action of a sort had already begun in the form of the Campaign for Social Justice, an organisation based mainly in Dungannon and headed by Dr. Conn McCluskey and his wife Patricia. They spent a considerable amount of time documenting and quantifying examples of discrimination, gerrymandering, unfair housing allocation and administrative malpractice by Government departments, and it was perhaps this groundwork which spread the first awareness of the seriousness of the problem in Northern Ireland to the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster. The Communist Party [N. Ireland] were also active on the issue. In their 1962 programme "Ireland's Path to Socialism", they emphasised that the demand for democratic rights was one of the immediate political demands.

TRADE UNION INVOLVEMENT
The final strand in what was to be woven ir the civil rights campaign was the Trade Union Movement, particularly the Belfast & District Trades Union Council.
The Northern Committee of the Irish Congress of Trades Union, on two separate occasions, along with the Northern Ireland Labour Party, went on deputations to see Captain O'Neill. Their demands for One Man One Vote and repeal of the Special Powers Act were ignored, and 4 Belfast-based Stormont seats were not sufficient leverage for the NILP, then a political force, to obtain movement on the civil rights front.
In May 1965 the Trades Council organised a conference on civil liberties in the lecture room o the Amalgamated Transport & General Workers Union headquarters in Belfast and several trade union leaders spoke of their concern over the failure of the Government to implement basic democratic guarantees in Northern Ireland.
The trade unionists, mainly Protestants, had a ready audience in the members of the Campaign for Social Justice, the Communist Party, the Republicans and the Northern Ireland Labour Party, all of which sent representatives. For sectarian discrimination to be condemned by the union representatives of Belfast's Protestant working class was a big step, even in the enlightened sixties. Slowly the diverse strands of political thought were coming together. The need for reform had been documented and publicised, but it was a problem which needed more than recognition - it needed action.

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/crights/nicra/nicra781.htm

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FIRST MOVES
The first move in what was eventually to emerge as NICRA came from the Wolfe Tone Society. The Society recognised the growing awareness of the need for a broad organisation to channel the demands for democratic reform and to this end they organised a meeting of all Wolfe Tone Societies in Maghera in August, 1966.
The outcome was a decision to hold a public meeting to highlight the issue of civil rights in Northern Ireland. This was held in the War Memorial Building in Belfast in November, 1966, and its attendance was drawn from all sectors of libertarianism in Northern Ireland, the Chairman being John D. Stewart.
The two main speakers were Ciaran Mac An Ali, who spoke on "Civil Liberty - Ireland Today" and Kadar Asmal, who spoke on "Human Rights, International Perspective".
The support for this public meeting prompted the Belfast Wolfe Tone Society - effectively Fred Heatley and Jack Bennett - to hold another broad meeting with a view to setting up a formal organisation which could be devoted to unifying the struggle for civil rights.

EVEN UNIONISTS ATTENDED
The meeting was held at Belfast's International Hotel on January 29, 1967. All political parties in Northern Ireland were represented. Unionist Senator Nelson Elder attended, but after losing an argument for the retention of hanging for the murder of policemen, he walked out. A letter from the Unionist Chief Whip, James Chichester-Clarke, stated that he would try to get someone along. In all there was over one hundred people present and a 13 man committee was elected to draw up a draft constitution and a programme of campaign for submission to a later meeting.
A five point outline of broad objectives was issued to the press after the inaugural meeting. These were:
* To defend the basic freedoms of all citizens
* To protect the rights of the individual
* To highlight all possible abuses of power
* To demand guarantees for freedom of speech, assembly and association
* To inform the public of their lawful rights.
These five demands later became the rallying cry for thousands of marchers. They were the inscriptions on banners in countless marches and the slogans on the lips of countless marchers. They were the demands which motivated thousands of marching feet and they were ultimately the five basic demands for which many people lost their lives. They were five demands which were not based on an elaborate political philosophy but came rather from the politics of instinct, trained and developed by fifty years of Unionist Government.
It is to these five demands that the present political situation in Northern Ireland can be traced.

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/crights/nicra/nicra781.htm

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The peaceful civil rights group, Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was met with this;

SECTARIAN FEELINGS HEIGHTENED
The RUC, despite the appearance of protection, made little effort to prevent attacks on the marchers apart from advising re-routing or cancellation of the march. Attacks were made in Antrim and Toome, outside Maghera, in Dungiven, at Burntollet Bridge and on the way into Derry. As an exercise in marching it was either foolhardy or brave, but as part of an attempt to put political pressure on a Government to grant basic democratic reforms it succeeded only in raising the political temperature. The end result of the march was a heightening of sectarian feelings. The Loyalists, angered by what they regarded as a provocative march, could feel no sympathy towards the civil rights campaign, even though they too could benefit from the same civil rights. They saw civil rights as a threat to the Government, and consequently as a threat to Protestant privilege. The PD march helped to drive the Protestant working class into the arms of Paisley and Bunting.
On the Catholic side the march, particularly the Burntollet ambush, was seen as a Protestant attack on the Catholic students. Civil rights was slowly becoming identified in the Catholic mind with opposition to the Unionist regime, and that meant opposition to the state. A conscious attempt to organise a broad nonsectarian civil rights movement was being gradually identified with a sectarian ideology and the PD's failure to distinguish between political progress and political turmoil hardly helped to reassure the Loyalist population.


LOYALIST BOMBS EXPLODE
There was an impatient element also within the Unionist population. Annoyed at O'Neill's failure to tackle the civil rights problem in a military manner, militant Loyalists blasted him out of office by damaging water and electricity supplies on 20th April 1969. At the same time his Minister for Agriculture, James Chichester-Clarke, resigned on the grounds that the introduction of one man, one vote "might encourage militant Protestants even to bloodshed". O'Neill, trapped by Westminster on the one man, one vote issue, was hounded out of office as the fall guy for the failure of the Unionist Party to recognise the changing political situation. But the new premier was nothing more than a new face on an old policy, and worse still, it was a face without a political brain to back it.
SAMUEL DEVENNEY'S DEATH
It was during Chichester Clarke's term of office that the first murder occurred. On Saturday, April 19th, civil rights supporters held a sit-down demonstration in Derry which was attacked by a Paisley-led counter demonstration. In the violence which followed the RUC took the side of the loyalists and severe rioting occurred throughout the city. The RUC led a number of raids into the Bogside, injuring a total of 79 civilians. During one raid they broke down the door of 42-year-old Samuel Devenney's house and in front of his children beat him senseless despite pleas for mercy from his daughter.
FIRST DEATHS
As the rift between PD and NICRA grew, violence began in several parts of the province. Most of it stemmed from the July Orange marches. On July 12 there was sectarian violence at Unity Flats in Belfast. On 13th there was similar violence in Derry and in Dungiven and by July 14 the Crumlin Road - Hooker Street area of Belfast had become a permanent trouble spot. Police baton charges in Dungiven left 66 year old Francis McCloskey dead and in Belfast's Disraeli Street a Catholic house was burned. On August 2 violence broke out again in Belfast at Unity Flats and at Hooker Street and it continued at regular intervals throughout the week. NICRA's position as a mass movement on the streets became hopeless. In Dungannon on August 11, for example, 100 members of NICRA picketed a meeting of the local council in protest against its housing policy. An event which six months previously would have received little opposition from the Unionist population was met with a hostile crowd and violence eventually broke out. The RUC batoned the civil rights picket and arrested 15 of them. Civil Rights protests had become identified as being Catholic in the increasing sectarian violence and the RUC joined in vigorously on the Protestant side.
NICRA�s demands to the Government were:
* one man, one vote in local government elections;
* votes at 18 in both local government and parliamentary franchise;
* an independent Boundary Commission to draw up fair electoral boundaries;
* a compulsory points system for housing;
* administrative machinery to remedy local government grievances;
* legislation which would outlaw discrimination, especially in employment;
* The abolition of the Special Powers Act and the disbandment of the 'B' Specials.

Followed by this;
The violence which began in Derry on August 12 and spread to Belfast later in the week changed the face of Northern politics. Following the RUC attempt to invade the Bogside the NICRA executive sought a meeting with Mr. Robert Porter, Minister for Home Affairs, because, they said, the Bogside situation had been completely mishandled. They felt that trouble could escalate throughout the province and proposed that the Minister should immediately withdraw the RUC from the Bogside. If the Minister refused they would have no alternative but to defy his newly imposed ban on marches and hold protests throughout the North. The ban was defied and it was after a CRA meeting in Armagh on August 14 that the 'B' Specials from Tynan murdered John Gallagher. In Belfast the RUC ran riot and murdered a nine year old boy in Divis Flats. Other deaths followed and the first widespread violence of the present era had begun.
The IRA itself had taken little part in the August violence. Dormant since 1962 political policies had dominated its activities and the violence had caught it unprepared, but the events in Derry and Belfast brought it suddenly back again to para-military reality.

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/crights/nicra/nicra781.htm

The Bobster said;
The IRA in Northern Ireland was an armed and violent terrorist group, and the political wing (Shin Fein) just in the last few years decided to disband and disarm them in return for amnesty and the ability to negotiate as equals with London - one can only wonder how long ago, how much sooner, this would have happened and brought not only the peace that exists now but also the kind of tolerance and prosperity that is starting to happen for the first in hundreds of years in that place.

Bobster it seems you have put the cart before the horse in this case. Ask any Englishman (or any British person), if the NAZIs had invaded during the battle of Britain and managed to occupy Britain, would there be an armed resistance? You are looking at this question from the point of the established status quo, that the government is a legitimate force. I personally think if you invade a country or ignore what the population want, you should be prepared to accept the consequences: Britain to America (Boston Tea Party?), Iraq to Kuwait, the Coalition to Iraq, Britain to Ireland, China to Tibet.

[Khenan]

[it's full of stars]

Thanks Khenan, just lucky I didn't say anything too stupid .

Remedial History for me I guess. But there are some statements I don't agree with. Should we lump drug dealers and gangs in with political activists? Was the civil rights movement stalled by the formation of the BPs? Seems to me that waiting from the 1600s to 1968 was the stall, a bill was passed the year after their formation.


And I showed that violence did have a part to play in legitimate political change, which decades of talk had not achieved (Rep Ire).


My original idea was that violence can be useful when other means have been exhausted and The Bobster smacked my wrist and wrote the IRA etc. I have shown that the IRA had become a spent force and only became active again in defence of its own community after peaceful marches for civil liberties were attacked and people were killed by Loyalists and the RUC.

Ireland was violent for centuries, after the invasion and colonisation by the British. I suppose we should thank the British for beating peace into those uppity leprachauns.

If you are going to espouse peace, it should be from the get go, not after you invade a place. Seems hypocritical to me to say look at these people we killed, starved and indentured, then denied political freedoms, killing our troops and judges.

For example, make economic, scientific ties with a country like Iran, save yourself the trouble of another war and a clean up. Hearts and minds.

[Khenan]

Well, you certainly have a point in there somewhere.... violence tends to be a requisite of revolutions. There have been exceptions, which have been mentioned in this thread already, but violence does seem to act as a catalyst.

However, Malcom X and the Black Panthers did not have a significant impact on the situation in america. The civil rights movement of the 20th century was a long buildup that was 99% nonviolent. It took place in marches, protests, boycots, and (and this is important) courtrooms. There were a handful of black men who took on legal cases that created precident for Brown.

Sorry, too hungover to be terribly coherant....

[it's full of stars]

Grassyass

[The Bobster]

[it's full of stars]

The Bobster wrote;
Almost a century of blood. Think of it. And what did it accomplish? Nothing. When the blood stopped, progress started.

I think saying this you are trying to avoid responding to the details in my earlier posts. I showed you that the Civil Rights movement tried to protest peacefully and was attacked by both Loyalists and the police force in Northern Ireland. This led to the reawakening of the IRA in Ireland. Peaceful protest begat violence which in turn begat violence. Read it again and visit the websites, you�re only listening to yourself, you aren�t actually listening to me.

Remember my questions from before:
1) was violence necessary to bring about a particular change? and 2) did things actually get better?

In regards to The Republic of Ireland, you can�t deny that violence wrought political change. Violence is justified because nation states use it, Britain invaded Ireland, the Irish resisted. Eventually they were able to get most of their country back and self govern. Are the majority of Irish people better off now than they were 9 decades ago? You tell me, you compare the daily lot of the Irish under British rule and the modern life of the Irish.

[The Bobster]

[it's full of stars]

Respectfully, Bull hockey.

They marched and were attacked. They marched and were attacked. they marched and guess what? They were attacked. I'm not defending the IRA. I simply pointed out that peaceful protests were met with violence. That in turn led to more violence.

I agree, the IRA are murdering scum, I never argued that point.

I don't care if you have friends in N. Ireland, you can still be wrong about the origins of something (1916,1969) not the latter day actions of the same group (1980s to 1990s). I know Somalies, Iranians and Iraqis and I don't think they are always correct. Shit, are all Americans right about Iraq?

Those same friends of yours, ask them what their parents thought when the lower falls was being burnt by Loyalists and the IRA chased them off. 10 to 1 they weren't scum then.

Subsequent actions by madmen, drug runners and gangsters certainly does take the shine off those moments I'll agree. I know people from Belfast too, I'm not a lentil eating non violent priviledged middle class bike riding philosopher. But sometimes you either put up or shut up, especially when your house is on fire.

non violence = lucky

[it's full of stars]

If you disagree with civil disobedience then the USA as we know it, UK, France and many other modern nations wouldn't exist. They have gone through revolutuion and violence to arrive at their present democratic forms.

Are you going to phone the states and tell them they have an illegal government and you want the Brits or Native Americans back in charge?

What about defending South Korea, was that a mistake.

Civil disobedience, would shooting Hitler be ok? Pol Pot, Stalin? To save the millions who died under their regimes?

Violence, when can you use violence in your opinion? If you wake up and someone is in your bedroom with a knife?

What about the Janjiweed in Darfur, would ya talk to them when they set fire to your house, rape your wife and children then get set to kill you?

What about in Kenya last week, would you defend yourself? Over a 1000 people dead, when would you draw the line and decide enough is enough, I'm going to stick up for myself.