Civil Rights For Minorities: Early Twentieth Century

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." - - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1938 (Isaacs 66)

The rights of many people versus the rights of an individual is certainly a vexing concept. Like a delicate balancing act; if one side is favoured over the other it causes a rift in the already strained relationship between the minority and majority. Evidently, the justification of taking any side must be valid, according to the theories of H.L.A. Hart. In the past, Canadian law has violated the rights of minorities; however, these violations have decreased in their severity as time has passed on. Some cases where the balance between minority and majority rights is questioned is in The Canadian Indian Residential School System, Bill 101, Equality in the Workplace and The Public Service Act.

Civil Liberties and Civil Rights are two terms that are often used interchangeably in America. Since the founding of our nation there has always been the debate of the limit of government and what rights were guaranteed to each individual. Many of the architects of our government feared that national government could one day become too powerful and begin to infringe on the individual rights of the citizens. As a result, a Bill of Rights was added to our constitution. The Bill of Rights serves as a guide of what the government cannot do. Civil Liberties simply establish precedent on what rights the United States government cannot abridge on. Civil Rights, on the other hand applies to the rights of individuals. Over the history of our nation the question of civil rights has found itself becoming a pillar of our legal system and has been very instrumental in our quest to become a “more perfect union”. In recent history one civil liberty that has caused a continual controversial debate is the second amendment, in addition to how it applies to gun control measures that are being proposed in order to decrease the level of mass shootings. The second amendment clearly defines the intention of individuals to have the right to bear arms. In order to understand why gun control advocates have failed to secure effective gun control legislation, we must explore the reasoning why the second amendment is interpreted the way it is and should Americans be allowed to own guns?

Our Founding Founders established the federal government with three distinct branches, each with powers over the other in order to have a proper checks and balances to ensure fairness across the board. The U.S. Constitution outlines the powers and responsibilities of the three branches of government and is a critical document for the federal government. Important laws and documents such as The Bill of Rights, The US Civil Rights Act and The Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) are managed by our Constitution. Below we will discuss three subjects which set up a diverse broad range of viewpoints that are essential in our democracy.

The twenty-first century has seen its share of civil rights actions. The movements and groups harmed in the United States has been shown support from countries in the Middle East, the UK, and even as far as Asia that are uninvolved but sympathetic and have given support back. When looking back on the nineteenth and twentieth century there was the same connection between countries even transatlantic from Britain to the United States. In a time with revolutions for social and political change and eventually war society was ripe for petitions for minority groups wanting emancipation including Women, Slaves, and Jews. The different groups supported and worked off each other to achieve their goals. The groups helped the others because they understood what it felt like to be marginalized from key aspects of a free and involved life.

Civil Rights are types of laws that embrace common situations that affect individual’s lives, such as employment, voting, housing, education and public accommodations and facilities. These laws exist as a matter of creating policies that promote opportunities for all persons and equality without regard of gender, race, disabilities, religion or national origin. This legal phenomenon might happen by various reasons: lack of equality in the society, prejudice against minorities, or existence of previous laws that support the oppressed.

All minority groups seem to suffer and seem to advance in some others, all though advancements usually took years to accomplish. Everyone who has come to America has been a minority at one point in history. People who came to America from across the sea were a group that suffered compared to the Native Americans. Then the Native Americans became a group who suffered at the hands of the white man. For this paper I will solely look at the minorities during WWII, the African-Americans, the Japanese-Americans and Mexican-Americans.

With all that has been examined, it is somewhat troubling to see that 21st century America today is very similar to America from the 1960’s. While it is true that Black Americans have gained civil rights and liberties, it is the current state of American society itself—as well as white fright—that dismisses these rights. The most infamous example of this is, of course, police shootings. Since the Trayvon Martin case, the United States seems to have exploded with more police shootings in which white police officers shoot unarmed black men. According to Mapping Police Violence, “Police killed at least 102 unarmed black people in 2015, nearly twice each week” (Police Violence). Indeed, America is now like the 1950’s because while Black Americans are now free to vote, walk in public, and partake in public programs of U.S. society, certain institutions still attempt to suppress their rights. This attempting at suppression of Black civil rights, moreover, can be attributed to white fright.

African Americans in the United States had struggling for equal rights since the end of the Civil War. Although the North's victory in the civil war was a step towards freedom, it in no way granted African Americans civil rights. Institutions such as the Jim Crow Laws reinforced racial inequality even after reconstruction. They served to segregate the races and promoted an inherently unequal system. African Americans fought to their best abilities for civil rights during the Reconstruction period after the civil war. Despite this, the Civil rights movement only began to gain momentum in the 1950s because of the Great Migration, World War II, and the NAACP's victory in Brown

Minorities face oppression in any society, each minority having a perspective and situation unique to their own experience. The complex relationship between the Asian Americans and other people of color’s opinions regarding affirmative action, an outcome of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, act as a stark reminder of the different effects of past injustices and current inequalities depending on the particular ethnic group. Affirmative action, essentially a policy designed to compensation/reparation/redress for the present disadvantages which minorities face as a result from past injuries and injustices throughout history with measures to improve their educational and economic opportunities. However, with affirmative action providing special privileges to minorities based solely on the color of

In order to answer the question on why minority rights became such a destabilizing force after the war, we must first look at what caused this problem to become the forefront of many European minds. At the beginning of the interwar period, two pivotal events took place that left stains on Europe; stains that, to some, indirectly led to the start of World War 2. The first and most important event was the publishing of Woodrow Wilson 's Fourteen points on January 8, 1918. These points were created in the hope to promote peace and harmony among the recently war stricken nations of Europe.

A minority can be defined by any category of people distinguished by physical or cultural differences that a society sets apart and subordinates.

Minorities are people that can be assembled as national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious. In addition migrants, refugees and indigenous. Minorities are discriminated, they develop and increase group loyalty as results of discriminatory. A minority group refers to a certain group of people differentiated from the social majority. Those who hold the majority of positions of social power in a society may be defined by law. Rather than a relational "social group." as the term would indicate, "minority group" refers to the above-described. “Minority group" often occurs alongside a speech of civil rights and collective rights which gained eminence in

In much of the political science and law literatures, the term `minority rights’ is used to refer to legal provisions that have two key features: first, they are intended to recognize or accommodate the distinctive needs of non-dominant ethnic or racial groups; and second, they do so by adopting minority-specific measures, above and beyond the non-discriminatory enforcement of universal individual rights that apply regardless of group membership. In this respect, minority rights are often distinguished from anti-discrimination policies, as two distinct (but complementary) tools for protecting minorities from injustice at the hands of dominant groups. Ensuring that members of minorities have equal access as individual citizens to the ballot box is an anti-discrimination measure; ensuring that a certain number of parliamentary seats are reserved for members of minorities, or establishing self-governing institutions within a minority’s homeland, are minority rights measures. Similarly, the right to speak or publish freely in a minority language is entailed by the basic individual right of freedom of speech – to forbid speech in a minority language would constitute discrimination in the exercise of that right – but to insist that the state provide road signs, public education or tax forms in a minority’s language is a minority right. Minority rights, in short, involve positive group-specific measures, not just the non-discriminatory enforcement of universal individual rights.