Income Inequality and The Civil Rights Movement

Introduction
The issue of income inequality is a crucial piece of your upcoming re-election campaign this fall. Similarly to the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the 1960s, a high level of inequality can hamper social cooperation, encourage intra-elite competition, and ultimately during wartime, as illustrated in the Vietnam War, can further exasperate the American people’s frustrations with income inequality.
Social Cooperation
Turchin mentioned in the article you read on Bloomberg that “high inequality is corrosive of social cooperation” and as Martin Luther King aptly said, ”how often the frustrations of second class citizenship and humiliating status lead us into blind outrage against each other”12. The Freedom Ride of 1961 is an example I can use to illustrate how inequality corrodes social cooperation and can be an instigator of violence. No state obeyed the decisions of the federal law to end segregation and in fact it was “business as usual” in the deep South at the time of the Freedom Ride3. Freedom Riders were looking to get the attention of the President, who had to this point in his term ignored the Civil Rights Movement in favor of the Cold War. The apathetic and slow response of federal reinforcement was reflected on by SNCC member, Julian Bond,“The Civil Rights Movement was an afterthought of an afterthought and now all of a sudden all hell is breaking loose”4. The disparity between how blacks were treated in comparison to whites, the social norms in place that allowed this to occur, and slow federal government response set into action the extreme violence that took place when the Freedom Ride arrived in Alabama. “In reality they (Freedom Riders) were really courting violence in order to ...

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...3,12 Howard-Pitney, David, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004,125.3 "Freedom Riders." American Experience. PBS. (2010) Week 7 Documents, Oregon State University, Department of History, Corvallis, OR HST 203.
6 George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of The New America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 3717 George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of The New America, 3668 McCormack, John. "Gingrich to Occupy Wall Street: "Go Get a Job Right after You Take a Bath"" The Weekly Standard (2011): n. pag. Web.
12 Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History,97213 SNCC Statement of Purpose (October 2010), Week 7 Documents, Oregon State University, Department of History, Corvallis, OR HST 203.