Protest And Politics

Paper Summary:

Revolutionary movements have come and gone for as long as people articulate their own suffering. This paper explains how no two revolutions and no two social protest movements are ever alike. From motivations to social make-up, from method to longevity, each movement is unique. The paper examines two important movements which emerged within the last hundred years - the American Civil Rights movement and the revolutionizing of Argentina's mothers in response to the political "disappearances" committed by the junta government. It explains how these two movements are drastically different in many ways, including causation, method, structure and scope. It also analyzes how the way in which they both used protest, image, and self-sacrifice to evoke the awareness and sympathy of the world, they are alike.

From the Paper:

"The US Civil Rights Movement is relatively unique in the scope of history on that its major players, and those for whom it was attempting to secure rights, were all members of a former slave race. Never before, so far as can be told, has a large population of freed slaves loudly and politically campaigned over an extended amount of time for equality with their former masters. There is something uniquely American about both the phenomena of black slavery as it existed here, and the subsequent civil rights movement. (In what other historical example have slaves, after being freed, continued to ask for political equality? When the Israelites were freed by the Egyptians, for example, they didn't stick around to demand pyramids in their honor. This grand social experiment is both a tribute to the ingenuity of its founders and to the adaptability of the American system)."

More papers on Protest And Politics:

• Comparison Essay # 62916 : "Political Protest and Passive Resistance"
• Essay # 5264 : "Northern Ireland and Politics of Religion"
• Essay # 15703 : "Political Protest and Writing In China in the 1980s"

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