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During the Asian American civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s, activists fought for the development of ethnic studies programs in universities, an end to the Vietnam War, and reparations for Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. The movement had come to a close by the late 1980s.

The Birth of Yellow Power

By watching Black people expose institutional racism and government hypocrisy, Asian Americans began to identify how they, too, had faced discrimination in the United States.

" The 'Black power' movement caused many Asian Americans to question themselves," wrote Amy Uyematsu in "The Emergence of Yellow Power," a 1969 essay.

"'Yellow power' is just now at the stage of an articulated mood rather than a program-disillusionment and alienation from white America and independence, race pride and self-respect."

Black activism played a fundamental role in the launch of the Asian American civil rights movement, but Asians and Asian Americans influenced Black radicals as well.

Black activists often cited the writings of China's communist leader Mao Zedong. Also, a founding member of the Black Panther Party- Richard Aoki-was Japanese American. A military veteran who spent his early years in an internment camp, Aoki donated weapons to the Black Panthers and trained them in their use.

Impact of Internment

Like Aoki, a number of Asian American civil rights activists were Japanese American internees or the children of internees. The decision of President Franklin Roosevelt to force more than 110,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps during World War II had a detrimental impact on the community.

Forced into camps based on fears that they still maintained ties to the Japanese government, Japanese Americans attempted to prove that they were authentically American by assimilating, yet they continued to face discrimination.

Speaking out about the racial bias they faced felt risky for some Japanese Americans, given their past treatment by the U.S. government.

Laura Pulido, wrote in "Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles:"

"Unlike other groups, Japanese Americans were expected to be quiet and behave and thus did not have sanctioned outlets to express the anger and indignation that accompanied their racially subordinated status."

When not only Black people but also Latinxs and Asian Americans from various ethnic groups began to share their experiences of oppression, indignation replaced fear about the ramifications of speaking out.

Asian Americans on college campuses demanded a curriculum representative of their histories. Activists also sought to prevent gentrification from destroying Asian American neighborhoods.

Explained activist Gordon Lee in a 2003 Hyphen magazine piece called "The Forgotten Revolution":

"The more we examined our collective histories, the more we began to find a rich and complex past. And we became outraged at the depths of the economic, racial and gender exploitation that had forced our families into roles as subservient cooks, servants or coolies, garment workers and prostitutes, and which also improperly labeled us as the 'model minority' comprised of 'successful' businessmen, merchants or professionals."

Students' Efforts

College campuses provided fertile ground for the movement. Asian Americans at the University of California, Los Angeles launched groups such as the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and Orientals Concerned.

A group of Japanese American UCLA students also formed the left-leaning publication Gidra in 1969. Meanwhile, on the East Coast, branches of AAPA formed at Yale and Columbia. In the Midwest, Asian student groups formed at the University of Illinois, Oberlin College, and the University of Michigan.

Recalled Lee:

"By 1970, there were more than 70 campus and...community groups with 'Asian American' in their name. The term symbolized the new social and political attitudes that were sweeping through communities of color in the United States. It was also a clear break with the name 'Oriental.'"

Outside of college campuses, organizations such as I Wor Kuen and Asian Americans for Action formed on the East Coast.

One of the movement's greatest triumphs was when Asian American students and other students of color participated in strikes in 1968 and '69 at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley for the development of ethnic studies programs. Students demanded to design the programs and select the faculty who would teach the courses.

Today, San Francisco State offers more than 175 courses in its College of Ethnic Studies. At Berkeley, Professor Ronald Takaki helped develop the nation's first Ph.D. program in comparative ethnic studies.

Vietnam and Pan-Asian Identity

A challenge of the Asian American civil rights movement from the outset was that Asian Americans identified by ethnic group rather than as a racial group. The Vietnam War changed that. During the war, Asian Americans-Vietnamese or otherwise-faced hostility.

Lee said:

"The injustices and racism exposed by the Vietnam War also helped cement a bond between different Asian groups living in America. In the eyes of the United States military, it didn't matter if you were Vietnamese or Chinese, Cambodian or Laotian, you were a 'gook,' and therefore subhuman."

The Movement Ends

After the Vietnam War, many radical Asian American groups dissolved. There was no unifying cause to rally around. For Japanese Americans, though, the experience of being interned had left festering wounds. Activists organized to have the federal government apologize for its actions during World War II.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed Proclamation 4417, in which internment was declared a "national mistake." A dozen years later, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which distributed $20,000 in reparations to surviving internees or their heirs and included an apology from the federal government.

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Important Events of the Asian American Civil Rights Movement

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During the Asian American civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s, activists fought for the development of ethnic studies programs in universities, an end to the Vietnam War, and reparations for Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. The movement had come to a close by the late 1980s.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Black Power emphasized black self-reliance and self-determination more than integration. Proponents believed African Americans should secure their human rights by creating political and cultural organizations that served their interests. They insisted that African Americans should have power over th…

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Black Power began as revolutionary movement in the 1960s and 1970s. It emphasized racial pride, economic empowerment, and the creation of political and cultural institutions. During this era, there was a rise in the demand for Black history courses, a greater embrace of African culture, and a spread of raw artistic expression displaying the realities of African Americans.

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Although multi-racial coalitions between different immigrant groups had long played an important part in campaigns for civil rights on the West Coast, it wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s that diverse communities with different histories began to self-consciously unite as "Asian Americans."

The Asian American movement that promoted this new identity- which initially united Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino Americans, and then expanded to include Koreans, Southeast and South Asians, and Pacific Islanders- was driven largely by student activists radicalized by anti-Vietnam war and black power movements. Challenging stereotypes about Asian "passivity", and rejecting the exoticism and racism of "oriental" labels, Asian American activists mobilized this new consciousness to demand an end to racist hiring practices, biased school curricula, demeaning media stereotypes, residential discrimination, and the gentrification of historically Asian American neighborhoods. And though it was primarily a youth movement, and never completely spoke for all the communities it sought to represent, the Asian American movement arguably transformed older community institutions, created new ones, and dramatically advanced the development of Asian American power in American urban politics.

In Seattle, the Asian American movement emerged from an unusually deep legacy of multi-racial coalition building. During the 1930s, successful campaigns against bills that would have made interracial marriage illegal in Washington State brought Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino activists together, though Filipino activists took the lead. After World War II, the Jackson Street Community Council brought community leaders from Seattle's Asian and African American communities together to advocate for neighborhood improvement issues, which frequently included important civil rights advocacy. And in the early 1960s, City Council member Wing Luke and Human Rights Commission Chairman Phil Hayasaka helped connect Asian American communities to the struggle for open housing in Seattle.

But it wasn't until Rev. Mineo Katigiri formed the Asian Coalition for Equality (ACE) in 1969, and student activists (some members of ACE) formed the Oriental Student Union (OSU) at Seattle Central Community College and the UW Asian American Student Coalition (ASC) soon after, that organizations promoting a pan-Asian identity sparked a specifically Asian American movement in Seattle.

This special section of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project presents an important and rare collection of documents, photographs, and alternative newspaper articles to document some early features of the history of that movement. It is made possible with gracious contributions of photographs and rare documents from Larry Matsuda, Al Sugiyama, YK Kuniyuki, Ben Yorita, and Eugene Tagawa.

Asian Coalition for Equality: An organization that organized Asian Americans in solidarity with black civil rights campaigns, it quickly expanded to combat specifically anti-Asian forms of discrimination as well. It provided a precursor to and important training ground for later student activists.

Oriental Student Union Sit-In: In the Winter of 1971, the Oriental Student Union (OSU) sought to close down Seattle Central Community College with direct action protests modeled after the school's Black Student Union protests of 1969. They challenged the school's first black President, hired because of the BSU protests.

Kingdome Protest/ HUD March: The Groundbreaking of the Kingdome on November 2,1972 was supposed to be a public celebration. But Asian youth, upset that the stadium was located immediately next to Seattle's International District (ID), disrupted the event. Less than two weeks later, a march on the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offices kicked off the neighborhood's preservation movement.

International District Preservation Movement: A series of negotiations from 1973-75, culminating in a February, 1975 march on King County Executive John Spellman's office, helped Asian American activists gain mitigation money from the Kingdome's construction to help preserve Seattle's International District.

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Although multi-racial coalitions between different immigrant groups had long played an important part in campaigns for civil rights on the West Coast, it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that diverse communities with different histories began to self-consciously unite as “Asian ...

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Digital Learning Commons: African American Rights Movements: Black Power Movement

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Digital Learning Commons: African American Rights Movements: Black Power Movement

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Learn about the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s with this historical overview.

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Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.Video. NLCC Educational Media, 1996.
T he 1960s was a turbulent decade in American history, fraught with conflicts over isssues from Civil Rights to the war in Vietnam. The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, one of the least studied social movements of the 1960s, encompassed a broad cross section of issues—from restoration of land grants, to farm workers rights, to enhanced education, to voting and political rights. The video documentaryChicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement , a four-part documentary series, corrects this oversight. Ground-breaking for the material it covers, the series is one of the few to address the history of Mexican Americans in general and that of the Chicano Movement in particular; it is an indispensable resource for scholars and students.
C hicano! gives one a sense of the growing unrest of the Mexican American population. We witness, literally before our eyes, the emerging awareness of collective history, the power of mass action, and the evolution of the Chicano Movement. We learn that it begins in New Mexico with Reies Lpez Tijerina and the land grant movement, is picked up by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales in Denver who defines the meaning of Chicano through his epic poemI am Joaquin , embraces Csar Chvez and the farm workers, turns to the struggles of the urban youth, and culminates in growing political awareness and participation with La Raza Unida Party.
P art 1, "Quest for a Homeland," examines the beginnings of the movement by profiling Reies Lopez Tijerina and the land grant movement in New Mexico in 1966 and 1967. It shows how Tijerina's fight to convince the federal government to honor the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) galvanized Mexicans and Mexican Americans across the Southwest. It then moves on to discuss Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales and his founding of the Crusade for Justice in Denver in 1966. Focusing on the importance of his poem I am Joaquin, it highlights how Gonzales reached out to Chicano youth. This segment is useful for its discussion of the roots of Chicano nationalism through its affirmation of cultural identity grounded in Aztec myths such as that ofAztln , the mythical Chicano homeland.
P art 2, "The Struggle in the Fields," examines the importance of Csar Chvez and his efforts to organize farm workers in the central valley of California. It delineates the various components of Chvez's strategy for farm worker self determination—strikes, boycotts, pilgrimages, fasts—and emphasizes his commitment to nonviolence and the importance of faith and prayer in achieving his goal.

P art 3, "Taking Back the Schools," is the best of the four parts. It covers the Los Angeles high school blow outs of 1968 thoroughly and with passion. Part 3 is also likely to be the most interesting to students because they can witness young people their own age forcefully agitating for change.
It is also striking because the catalysts for the walk outs—high drop out rate, crumbling schools, lack of Mexican American teachers—still resonate today. This segment is visually interesting as well because the filmmakers made a conscious effort to interview actual participants (which they do in all the segments). Here they actually go back and forth between a photo or video of a participant from the 1960s to that same person being interviewed today, and it is insightful to see how that individual changed in the intervening thirty years. For example, at one point the video discusses how the students were trying to garner outside support for their cause in order to legitimate it in the eyes of the school board. Robert Kennedy agrees to meet with student leaders and offer his support (he was running for president at the time and was in California to meet with Csar Chvez), and we see a picture of Kennedy surrounded by student leaders. The camera then focuses on a young Harry Gamboa -one of the walk-out leaders-standing next to Kennedy and the video then fades away to a current day interview with him.
P art 4, "Fighting for Political Power," discusses the creation of La Raza Unida Party as a third party force for political power and the importance of political rights. It culminates in the 1972 election and the Raza Unida convention, and the fragmentation of the party at the height of its membership and recognition.

E ach of these hour-long parts may be viewed individually. (It would, in fact, be very rare for a teacher to be able to devote all four hours to class time, even one specifically dealing with Chicano history.)
Nearly every segment, to its credit, treats the historical background surrounding the events. For example, "Quest for a Homeland" briefly discusses the Mexican American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and why Tijerina felt that he was right to fight for the land. Similarly, "Fighting for Political Power" explains the inequities of voting rights in Texas along with the history of unequal distribution of political power in Crystal City, Texas, the birth place ofLa Raza Unida Party . Despite the fact that Mexican Americans made up the majority of the population in the city, no one of Mexican descent held political office. Chicano! is very good at explaining the plight of Mexican Americans historically and during the Chicano Movement. The series provides a keen sense of what it was like to have brown skin in the 1960s. One interviewee, for example, remembers that farm workers were thought of as ignorant, lazy, stupid, and dirty. In another segment, a second interviewee recalls that being Mexican was a burden—Mexican Americans were not respected and were treated as second-class citizens.
A s with most documentaries, Chicano! makes excellent use of photo archives and film footage of the period. It succeeds where many documentaries fail in that the filmmakers were able to interview the actual participants in the events, as opposed to only scholars of the subject. Furthermore, the documentary series is to be commended for attempting to provide a balanced portrait of events. In the segment on the farm workers and Csar Chvez, we hear from farm owners whose produce was boycotted and land picketed at the height of the protests. Similarly, for the segment on the Los Angeles high school walk outs of 1968, the filmmakers interviewed both school board members and high school officials who were there at the time.

N ot only do the four segments illuminate distinct aspects of the movement (land, farm workers, politics, urban issues, education), but they also attempt to delineate the diversity of the Chicano Movement not merely through causes, but also through geography and demographics. The viewer learns of rural problems in California which are in stark contrast to those of New Mexico. The documentary distinguishes between issues surrounding the high school walk outs in L.A., as opposed to those behind theCrystal City , Texas walk outs. The former occurred over drop-out rates and lack of recognition of Chicano culture and history, the latter due to Chicanas being barred from cheerleading. The students from L.A. never really had their concerns addressed, while the students in Crystal City won their cause, leading in part to the galvanization of the Raza Unida Party. We learn of the differing political agendas of Chicano leaders across the Southwest: Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and California (Arizona is conspicuously left out of the equation).

W hile the discussion of the broad spectrum of issues across the Southwest is a strength of the series, it is also a weakness. Those whose only exposure to Mexican American history is through this series, would be left with the impression that Mexican Americans only live in the Southwest and that only the states covered had active Chicano movements. This, of course, is not the case.
Strong Chicano and Mexican American communities exist throughout the country and nearly all of them, particularly those in the Midwest, agitated for change. They all had their own movements at the local level and participated in activities at the national level. This shortcoming is, of course, a function of the series' length, and the filmmakers do make token references to other parts of the country. For example, during a segment on the Crusade for Justice and the first Chicano Youth Conference in Denver in 1967, the poet Alurista remarks how he was amazed to see so many Chicanos from all over the country, even Kansas. "I didn't know," he remarks incredulously, "there were any Mexicans in Kansas!" Similarly, in the series' discussion of the growth of La Raza Unida Party, narrator Henry Cisneros notes that chapters of the party proliferated throughout the country, even in Nebraska.
W hat the individual videos do not do, however, is discuss the outcomes of the events in question or their significance.
In Part 1, "Quest for a Homeland," the filmmakers move from discussing Tijerina and the question of land grants to Corky Gonzales and the Crusade for Justice. The transition is fine, but we never find out what happened to Tijerina and his cause. The viewer is left hanging, with no information. This also occurs in Part 3 "Taking Back the Schools." This segment follows the sequence of events that led to the Los Angeles student walk outs of 1968, culminating in the galvanization of the community to have Sal Castro , a teacher who supported the walk outs, reinstated after being fired by the school board. We are treated to video of the students' take over and sit in of the school board and their ultimate success in having Castro re-hired, but we are never told what happened with the students' original demands of the school board (bilingual education, Mexican American history courses, more Mexican American teachers). The film would have you believe that the walk outs were a success because the community came together in support of Castro. It never goes on to explain that the state of the schools remained virtually the same. A lso, Chicano! never explains until the end of the final video the continuing and overarching significance of the Chicano Movement and its legacy. It defines these as the new awareness of farm workers, increased labor activism, and growing visibility of educational and community needs. According to the documentary, the Chicano Movement galvanized and trained a new generation of activists and leaders and brought to a national stage a variety of issues important to the Mexican American community. However, the significance of each event needs to be further highlighted at the end of each segment for it to be truly effective.
F or any one teaching about the Civil Rights Movement, Mexican American, Chicano, or Latino history, or the history of political activism, however, the series is a must see. Students will greatly benefit from this remarkable series about an extraordinary time in history.

Valerie Mendoza
University of Kansas

~ End ~

Video Review of Chicano! History of the
Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Comments |JMMH Contents
Copyright © 2000, 2001 by The Journal for MultiMedia History

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Chicano! A History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.

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Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Video. NLCC Educational Media, 1996. T he 1960s was a turbulent decade in American history, fraught with conflicts over isssues from Civil Rights to the war in Vietnam.

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Antiwar march October 31, 1970, Seattle, two months after the death of Reuben Salazar in the Los Angeles Chicano Moratorium protest

by Josue Estrada

The Chicano movement that took shape in the late 1960s transformed the identity, the politics, and the community dynamics of Mexican Americans. The movement had many dimensions and no single organization could represent the full range of agendas, objectives, tactics, approaches, and ideologies that activists pursued. The largest and most notable organizations included the United Farm Workers Union, the Alianza Federal del Pueblos Libres, the Crusade for Justice, and the Raza Unida Party (formerly the Mexican American Youth Organization).

Central to the Chicano movement were also student and youth organizations such as the Brown Berets and the United Mexican American Students, the Mexican American Student Confederation, and the Mexican American Student Association that eventually merged to form El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano/a de Aztlan (MEChA) in 1969.

The use of term Chicano rather than Mexican American in the title of the organization was intentional. Chicano signaled a rejection of a Mexican American identity that accepted assimilation and shunned their cultural roots. Instead, MEChistA's opted to identify as Chicanos, reflecting their commitment to a new political consciousness, self-respect, and pride in their cultural background.

Scholars have paid some attention to the geography of Chicano activism but not in the detail that now becomes possible with the maps this project provides. The starting assumption is that the movement was concentrated in the Southwest where Mexican American populations were largest. That is true but our maps show activism was not spread evenly through the region and that certain organizations and types of activism were limited to particular geographies. [The accompanying images will take you to large-format interactive maps that show year-by-year or month-by-month the changing geography of eight organizations]

Click to see year-by-year interactive Raza Unida maps

For instance, in southern Texas where Mexican Americans comprised a significant portion of the population and had a history of electoral participation, the Raza Unida Party started in 1970 by Jose Angel Gutierrez hoped to win elections and mobilize the voting power of Chicanos. RUP thus became the focus of considerable Chicano activism in Texas in the early 1970s.

The movement in California took a different shape, less concerned about elections. Chicanos in Los Angeles formed alliances with other oppressed people who identified with the Third World Left and were committed to toppling U.S. imperialism and fighting racism. The Brown Berets, with links to the Black Panther Party, was one manifestation of the multiracial context in Los Angeles. The Chicano Moratorium antiwar protests of 1970 and 1971 also reflected the vibrant collaboration between African Americans, Japanese Americans, American Indians, and white antiwar activists that had developed in Southern California.

Chicano student activism also followed particular geographies. MEChA established in Santa Barbara, California in 1969, united many university and college Mexican American groups under one umbrella organization. MEChA became a multi-state organization, but an examination of the year-by-year expansion shows a continued concentration in California. Our maps and charts demonstrate that as the organization added dozens then hundreds of chapters, the vast majority were in California, which should lead scholars to ask what conditions made the state unique, and to wonder why Chicano students in other states were less interested in organizing MEChA chapters.

In the essay that follows, I will briefly assess the geography of Mexican American activism beginning with organizations founded before the Chicano era of the 1960 and 1970s.
Mexican American Activism 1929-1967
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was the most important Mexican American civil rights organization for much of the 20th century. Founded in 1929, in Corpus Christi, Texas, it was modeled after the NAACP and was largely the creation of activist Tejanos. The organization expanded quickly throughout south Texas but it was not until the mid-1930s that a chapter appeared outside of Texas and only in the mid-1940s did Mexican Americans in California begin to form chapters. In the late 1950s and early 1960s chapters formed in Chicago and other Midwestern cities.

LULAC's founders were professionals and merchants committed to working within the American political and economic system. The organization assisted Mexican Americans acquire voting rights and greater equality especially in employment and education. One of LULAC's notable achievements was their financial support for a successful federal lawsuit ( Méndez v. Westminster) which argued that segregation of Mexican Americans in the public schools of Orange County, California, was unlawful. The 1947 appellate court ruling became a precursor to Brown v. Board Supreme Court ruling that declared school segregation unconstitutional nationwide in 1954. Curiously, LULAC's arguments for equal access in schools and employment rested on the notion that Mexican Americans were legally white and therefore deserved equal rights akin to white Americans. This was the kind of cautious position that the activists of the Chicano generation would later criticize or condemn. Cynthia E. Orozco's No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (2009), explains that LULAC members in 1920s and 1930s did resist European American domination but used strategies commensurate to the era's focus on assimilation and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Taking a similar approach to LULAC, the American GI Forum was established in 1948 to address the discrimination experienced by returning World War II Mexican American GI's in the areas of employment, medical attention, housing, and education. These problems were particularly widespread in Texas where Dr. Hector P. Garcia and attorney Gustavo Garcia started the organization. The main objectives of the GI Forum were to aid needy and disabled veterans through nonviolent and democratic means. The GI Forum since its inception expressed a strong patriotic sentiment toward the United States, swore to protect the constitution, and defend the nation from all enemies.

Shortly after its founding, the GI Forum became a key institution that galvanized state and national attention when a white-owned mortuary refused to bury a Mexicano war veteran, Private Felix Longoria, in the white cemetery. Garcia was able to secure Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson's support and Private Longoria was buried in 1949 at Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery. The so-called "Longoria affair" was a catalyst for the expansion of the American GI Forum beyond Texas.

Like LULAC, the GI Forum rooted itself in Texas and spread slowly to other states. It was not until the 1960s that the organization became popular in California, and councils were founded in the Midwest and along the East coast in Connecticut, Maryland and Washington D.C. In contrast to LULAC, the America GI Forum was more willing to engage in oppositional politics and some of its members wearing their caps marched in solidarity with Chicanos protestors. Between 1969 and 1979, the Forum led a national boycott against the Adolph Coors Company, one of the largest beer producers in the nation, challenging the corporation's discriminatory employment practices affecting Chicanos. The American GI Forum, however, never formally supported the radical political activism of the Chicano movement.

United Farm Workers Union

The birth of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) in California in 1965 was a critical spark and integral part of the Chicano movement. The UFW was not merely a union but what Cesar Chavez called "El Movimiento," a crusade with broad goals and broad support. And although Chavez did not support Chicano cultural nationalism or consider himself a Chicano leader, the UFW inspired Chicano youth, radical activists, and civil rights organizations. The UFW appealed to many Chicanos because of its Mexicanness as highlighted in Chavez's Plan de Delano that spoke of the sacrifices the "Mexican race" had made to seek bread and justice.

The UFW began and pretty much remained a California-based organization. The union opened offices and conducted strikes in a few other states (notably Arizona, Texas, and Washington) but was cautious about over extending itself. Yet the UFW's reach went far beyond its formal structures. In its heyday, the UFW seemed to belong to Mexican Americans everywhere who embraced "La Causa," the fight for justice in the fields and for justice everywhere. Moreover, the union's militancy set it apart from other Mexican American middle-class organizations while resonating with young Chicanos.

While UFW locals and strikes were largely confined to California, it's campaigns depended upon boycotts that were conducted on a national and international scale. The UFW's great grape boycott beginning in 1968 was successful and mobilized Chicanos and others throughout the country while generating worldwide attention. The boycott elevated the profile of the UFW and the Chicano movement more than any other event. The maps above show how boycotts and other support activities spread far beyond California.

La Alianza

The actions of La Alianza Federal del Pueblos Libres (La Alianza) likewise influenced the early Chicano movement and its leaders. The Alianza was formed in 1963 in New Mexico and never expanded outside of the state. The organization wanted to reclaim the land and water rights lost to New Mexican Hispanos but guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. While initially La Alianza was an accomodationalist organization, in 1967 when Reis Tijerina became its president, La Alianza was radicalized, embraced cultural nationalism, and rejected middle-class tactics for redress. Between 1967 and 1969, La Alianza occupied the Echo Amphitheater at Kit Carson National Park, raided the Tierra Amarillo Courthouse to make a citizen's arrest of the Rio Arriba County district attorney, and attempted to reoccupy Kit Carson National Park, leading to Tijerina'sarrest and incarceration from 1969 to 1971. To younger Chicanos such as Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez of the Crusade for Justice and Jose Angel Gutierrez of the Mexican American Youth Organization, Tijerina who fiercely fought for land and justice became a model to emulate.

Crusade for Justice

The Crusade for Justice, founded in 1966 by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez in Denver, Colorado, sought to showcase the virtues of the Mexican American community through theater productions, dances, and fiestas to create unity and generate a political dialogue of how "la communidad" could solve their own problems. Early on Gonzalez preferred to keep the organization local rather than transform the Crusade for Justice into a statewide or national organization.

The Crusade for Justice, especially Gonzalez, provided the movement with a powerful political ideology of Chicanismo. Gonzalez popularized the term Chicano, proclaiming an identity that rejected assimilationist goals and an alternative to the label "Mexican American." Gonzalez denounced a history of cultural genocide at the hands of Anglo-Americans and urged Chicanos to fight back, an agenda described in his famous poem I Am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquin.

In 1969, the Crusade for Justice organized the First Annual Chicano Youth Liberation Conference where "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan" was drafted urging Chicanos to adhere to the manifesto's cultural nationalism and the notion of Aztlan as both a real and symbolic homeland. The conference was attended by thousands of students across the Southwest who returned to their communities to build the Chicano student/youth movement. The event also fueled Chicanismo and the conference became an important turning point of when the term Chicano took root in the vernacular of the Chicano movement.

In 1970, the Crusade for Justice spearheaded the organizing efforts of the Raza Unida Party in Colorado and the Midwest but its headquarters remained in Denver. At the same time, the organization came under siege by law enforcement agencies and Gonzalez's power struggle with Jose Angel Gutierrez led to the Crusade for Justice's political clout to fade by 1974.

Raza Unida Party

Like the Crusade for Justice, the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) was cultural nationalist and militant but focused on education and political empowerment. In 1967, Jose Angel Gutierrez and five other undergraduates and graduates in San Antonio, Texas, established MAYO. The organization expanded only within Texas. MAYO initiated an estimated thirty-nine high school walkouts from 1968 to 1969 including the Edcouch-Elsa, Kingsville, and Crystal City protests that garnered media attention. In the political arena, MAYO organized what became known as the "Chicano takeover" of Crystal City's school board and city council in 1970. This historic event established the Raza Unida Party in Texas and by 1972, MAYO was absorbed by the new political party.

Formed in 1970, the Raza Unida Party (RUP) sought to achieve electoral political power by creating an alternative to the nation's two-party system, which according to Chicanos had been unresponsive, unrepresentative, and indifferent to the needs of people of Mexican descent.

RUP's initial efforts were in Crystal City, Texas. Jose Angel Gutierrez and key supporters were able to elect party candidates to both the school board and the city council. These victories proved that a third party could be a viable option to achieve electoral influence, and led to the expansion of RUP in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. But RUP's electoral accomplishments outside of Texas were few with the exception of California where the party achieved some success in local elections. In California, our maps show that an estimated 93 new chapters were established from 1971 to 1973 . However, only in Texas was RUP listed as an official party and in 1972, the political party campaigned for the election of Ramsey Muniz for Texas governor. The Raza Unida candidate received nearly 220,000 votes, not enough to win, but an impressive showing.

But the party's days were numbered. Beginning in 1973, support for RUP faded. And by 1974, only Texas continued to start new chapters which was an indication of its inevitable decline. Outside of Texas activities declined precipitously. Power struggles between Jose Angel Gutierrez and Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez hurt the movement. Additionally, party members fought over ideological issues, dividing between those who had Marxist-Leninist and cultural nationalist orientations.

Brown Berets

The Brown Berets were founded in the barrios of Los Angeles in 1967 and modeled after the Black Panther Party. By 1969, 29 chapters were established mostly in California but units were also established in Albuquerque, Denver, Detroit, San Antonio, St. Paul, and Seattle. They wore paramilitary attire and certain chapters trained in guerrilla warfare and use of weapons. One of their primary goals was to protect the Chicano community against police brutality. Brown Beret chapters also demanded equality in employment, housing, and education, advocated for bilingual education, pressed for voting rights, and the right to bear and use arms against racially motivated attacks. The Brown Berets were involved in marches, anti-war protests, student-walkouts, and gained significant media attention when they staged an invasion of the Catalina Islands near Los Angeles in August 1972. Another important direct action was their mobilization of the East Los Angeles blowouts in 1968 where they acted as the security force for the thousands of protesting youth.

The Brown Berets high visibility and paramilitary stance made them a key target for infiltration, attacks, and harassment by local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When the Brown Berets were disbanded by Prime Minister David Sanchez in 1972, a total of 36 chapters had been established primarily near college and university campuses.

MEChA

Shortly after the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, MEChA was formed with the intent to further Chicanismo and committed to the ideas of "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan." The manifesto provided a strategy to establish Chicano Studies Departments within colleges and universities. To achieve this aim, "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan" called for the unification of all student organizations into one umbrella organization, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan which would become known by the acronym MEChA.

Most social movement organizations last only a few years and that is especially true for student-run organizations. But MEChA has been active on some campuses for nearly fifty years and the organization continues to grow, with more than 500 chapters as of 2012.

In 1969, MEChA was founded in Santa Barbara, California where Chicanos adopted "El Plan de Santa Barbara." The manifesto provided a strategy to establish Chicano Studies Departments within colleges and universities. By consolidating student's political power, MEChA became a significant on-campus political force and the name signified a position to challenge social injustices and to reject assimilation through radical activism on-campus and in the community.

While the student-led organization formed in California, MEChA became a national organization with chapters in junior middle schools, high schools, community colleges, and universities. Yet MEChA's geographic expansion was rather uneven. From 1969 to 1971, MEChA grew rapidly in California with major centers of activism on campuses in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and the Riverside-San Bernardino area. Other early chapters were also established in Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, and Indiana. In these years, new chapters were founded at universities and colleges exclusively.

By the early 1970s, a few MEChA chapters were founded in the East but mainly at Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Brown University. MEChA largely remained a West coast organization. Expanding further in the 1980s, MEChA chapters began to appear in community colleges and high schools, but again predominantly in California and especially Southern California.

Surprisingly, the organization did not catch on in Texas. A Mexican American Student Organization (MASO) was active at the University of Texas from 1967 until at least 1972 and students at St. Mary's College in San Antonio joined MAYO but there are no signs of MEChA chapters or other student groups in Texas until the mid-1980s.

As for Florida and other southern states, we have found no information about any chapters in this part of the country despite the growing Mexican American presence on campuses and in the region's cities. But if MEChA's geography was limited, its ability to survive and expand in California and other western states was remarkable. Student organizations rarely last very long. But MEChA has expanded decade by decade.

During the 1990s, MEChA experienced a decade of slow growth yet in the 2000s the organization saw an incredible upsurge of new chapters. High schools students led the charge predominantly within California and likely attributed to the anti-immigration (H.R. 4437) legislation proposed in the mid-2000s. Robert Tijerina Cantu in MEChA Leadership Manual: History, Philosophy & Organizational Strategy (2007) includes an impressive directory of over 100 high school MEChA chapters that we have mapped as part of the project. Much like when MEChA was established, student mobilization has propelled and maintained the organization relevant for nearly fifty years.

Chicano Press

For those inside and outside academic institutions, the Chicano press served as a medium to learn Chicano history, literature, and be informed of current news. Our database has mapped over 300 Spanish language newspapers and periodicals based in both small and large communities. Chicanos at many college campuses also created their own student newspapers. Yet, a significant number of these newspapers ceased publication within a year or two, or merged with other larger publications.

Marc S. Rodriguez in Rethinking the Chicano Movement (2015) provides a multifaceted study of the Chicano movement and demonstrates how newspapers were a crucial medium for the movement. The newspapers linked the core and periphery to create a national Chicano community. A significant component to the development of this national ethos was the Chicano Press Association.

Established in 1969, the Chicano Press Association tried to foster the growth these new media, arguing that the liberation of Chicano and other people required an active press. Influential beyond its official membership, the CPA represented about twenty newspapers, mostly in California but also in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida.

There was nothing uniform about newspapers, magazines, and journals published during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some were published by organizations such as the UFW's El Malcriado and the Brown Beret's La Causa and Regeneration, others by university student groups like MEChA, still others by independent publishers who created newspapers for particular communities like El Grito del Norte from Denver and Caracol from San Antonio. Collectively the more than 300 periodicals became the primary communication apparatus to circulate ideas, information, and to expand the reach of the Chicano movement.

Further reading:

Alaniz, Yolanda, and Cornish, Megan. Viva La Raza : A History of Chicano Identity and Resistance. 1st ed. Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press, 2008.

García, Ignacio. Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.

Gómez-Quiñones, Juan, and Vásquez, Irene. Making Aztlán : Ideology and Culture of the Chicana and Chicano Movement, 1966-1977. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014.

Muñoz, Carlos. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. Rev. and Expanded ed. London; New York: Verso, 2007.

Navarro, Armando. Mexicano Political Experience in Occupied Aztlan: Struggles and Change. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2005.

Rodriguez, Marc S. Rethinking the Chicano Movement. American Social and Political Movements of the Twentieth Century. New York: Routledge, 2015.

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Chicano Movement Geography - Mapping American Social Movements

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Antiwar march October 31, 1970, Seattle, two months after the death of Reuben Salazar in the Los Angeles Chicano Moratorium protest The Chicano movement that took shape in the late 1960s transformed the identity, the politics, and the community dynamics of Mexican Americans.

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Rising: The American Indian Movement and the Third Space of Sovereignty

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The red profile of an American Indian with a hand forming a peace sign, is the more well-known logo of AIM. At right, the AIM logo appears against the four-color bands of the cardinal directions; black/west, yellow/east, white/north, and red/south, are shared among Ojibwe and Lakota tribal groups. These colors are sometimes displayed in a circular manner, referred to as a Medicine Wheel, representing health and healing.

Listen to the AIM Theme by Blackfire

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Rising: The American Indian Movement and the Third Space of Sovereignty

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The red profile of an American Indian with a hand forming a peace sign, is the more well-known logo of AIM. At right, the AIM logo appears against the four-color bands of the cardinal directions; black/west, yellow/east, white/north, and red/south, are shared among Ojibwe and Lakota tribal groups.

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LibGuides: The Occupation of Alcatraz, 1969: Red Power Movement

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LibGuides: The Occupation of Alcatraz, 1969: Red Power Movement

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The 'Termination Policy' and AIM's Origins

In the first half of the 20 th century, the federal government imposed a higher degree of control over Indian lands, with the intention of breaking up tribes and assimilating their members into American cities. " Termination policy" became federal law in 1953, as Congress formally ended its recognition of more than 100 tribes, encouraging Indians to leave reservations for the cities of the West and Midwest. A significant number of people moved from reservations to the cities, where they encountered a lack of educational opportunities and racial profiling at the hands of the police.

Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, two Ojibwa men who had met in prison, founded AIM in 1968 in Minneapolis, along with Bellecourt's brother Vernon and Banks' friend George Mitchell. AIM's original goal was to curb racial profiling in Minneapolis and give a voice to Native Americans living in the city.

One of AIM's first actions was to create the AIM Patrol, which monitored how police and the courts treated Native Americans. AIM also supported the creation of the Indian Health Board of Minneapolis to provide healthcare to the Native community. Its leaders took inspiration from the civil rights movement and the policies of nonviolent confrontation that many of its leaders espoused, although as the years went on AIM members would occasionally take up arms.

Occupations and Education

AIM's early protests against police brutality earned the new organization notoriety, and its membership grew rapidly. Banks and other AIM members were a part of the coalition occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969, asserting Indigenous authority over the island in an ironic imitation of Europeans' takeover of the continent.

Other early AIM actions mirrored the Alcatraz occupation. On Thanksgiving 1970, AIM members seized a replica of the Mayflower in Boston Harbor, declaring a national day of mourning. The following year saw one of the most iconic protests in Native American history- the occupation of Mt. Rushmore. For two months, activists camped on the mountain, a sacred site to local tribes which had been turned into a monument to American presidents, demanding federal recognition of the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had granted the area to the Lakota tribe but was broken as soon as gold was discovered nearby.

Other occupations succeeded in winning material gains for local Natives. AIM played a role in the takeover of the Winter Dam in Wisconsin after it cause the flooding of Lac Court Oreilles Ojibwa land. The standoff ended with a settlement that returned 25,000 acres to the tribe. In 1971, 30 militants led by Herb Powless, founder of AIM's Milwaukee chapter, took over an abandoned Coast Guard station on the city's lakefront, citing a treaty from the previous century and claiming the land "for the good and welfare of the Indian people."

The occupiers were armed, but encountered no resistance, so they relocated an alcohol treatment program and the fledgling Indian Community School into the abandoned building. Eventually, the government recognized the Native Americans' right to the land, where the school operated for several years before moving to a new location. In 1972, the year after the occupation of the Milwaukee Coast Guard building, AIM founded the Heart of the Earth Survival School in Minneapolis, a K-12 school designed as an alternative to schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Trail of Broken Treaties, Recognition and Blowback

A consistent tactic of AIM organizers has been to draw attention to the federal government's long history of broken promises to Indigenous Americans. In 1972, AIM organized its most ambitious action to date, the Trail of Broken Treaties. Hundreds of Native Americans drove in caravans, beginning on the West Coast, to the offices of the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. During the occupation, AIM released the Twenty Points, a list of demands that included the re-recognition of Native tribes, abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (an organ of the Department of the Interior) and federal protections for Indigenous cultures and religions. The occupiers held the BIA office for a week, building a tipi on its lawn.

President Richard Nixon dismissed the Twenty Points but took the protest seriously, endorsing self-determination for Indian tribes. With his support, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which reversed the termination policy and provided recognition and funds to Indian tribes.

Between the Trail of Broken Treaties and the passage of the Self-Determination Act, however, violent conflict erupted between Native American activists and federal authorities. In 1973, an Indian man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull was stabbed to death by a white man in Custer, South Dakota. AIM activists and others rallied to the area to demand justice, but were not satisfied with the local authorities' response. The confrontation escalated into a riot in Custer followed by an armed Indian occupation of the Pine Ridge Reservation, the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.

For 71 days, as federal marshals and the FBI cordoned off the area and refused to allow the press inside. In sporadic exchanges of gunfire, two Indian activists were killed and another 14 wounded, with two FBI agents killed and two wounded. Ray Robinson, an African American civil rights activist, disappeared while occupying Wounded Knee, and is believed to have been murdered. Banks was arrested, along with prominent AIM member Russell Means, although the charges against them were later thrown out.

The Washington protests and the violence at Pine Ridge drew attention to AIM's cause. Later that year, actor Marlon Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather, a woman who had participated in the occupation of Alcatraz and who claimed Native American ancestry, to accept the Academy Award for Best Actor on his behalf. In 1974, AIM called for a gathering of Indigenous people from across the Western Hemisphere on the land of the Standing Rock Sioux in South Dakota. More than 5,000 representatives from 98 Indigenous nations attended, forming the International Indian Treaty Council. Later that year, the IITC received official recognition from the UN, the first Indigenous organization to do so.

In 1975, the Department of Housing and Urban Development designated AIM as the primary sponsor of Little Earth of United Tribes, the first Indigenous housing project in the country, in Minneapolis. In 1978, AIM organized a second march from the West Coast to Washington, titled the " Longest Walk." President Jimmy Carter refused to meet with the protestors, but the action received support from Sen. Robert Kennedy and cultural figures like Brando and boxer Muhammad Ali. Their arrival coincided with the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which granted Native Americans the right to use certain lands and controlled substances for religious ceremonies.

Fighting for Culture and International Indigenous Rights

The late 1970s and '80s were marked by infighting within AIM, as the revelation that the organization's head of security was an FBI informant sowed seeds of distrust. In recent decades, AIM has been known primarily for cultural advocacy and for its work on behalf of Indigenous rights on a global scale.

In 1991, Clyde Bellecourt and others revived the Sundance, a traditional gathering of celebration and thanksgiving, at Pipestone National Monument. The ceremony has been held every year since. Clyde's brother Vernon became active in the fight to rename American sports teams, convincing the NCAA to bar the use of Indian mascots during its tournaments in 2005. None of Bellecourt's "big four" targets had changed their names before his death in 2007, but two of them-now known as the Cleveland Guardians and the Washington Commanders-eventually relented.

In 2007, the UN adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, enshrining the rights of Indigenous peoples to cultural and ceremonial expression, identity, language, employment, health and education into international law by a vote of 144 to 4 (the United States and Canada both voted "no"). The declaration was a watershed moment for the international Indigenous community which AIM had helped unite.

Despite these victories, AIM itself split in 1993, with one successor organization based in Minneapolis and another based in Denver. In 2008, the Heart of the Earth Survival School closed as its Executive Director was investigated for fraud, but over its 36-year history, the school graduated more Native students than the rest of the Minneapolis public school system put together.

Often overshadowed by other, larger movements and by the infighting that led to its rupture, AIM was nevertheless an active and highly effective element of the broader push for civil rights in the 1960s and '70s. Its early radical actions and repeated occupations of government buildings succeeded in extracting concessions, including the passage of laws that dramatically altered federal policy toward Native Americans.

HISTORY Vault: Native American History

Sources

American Indian Movement. AIMovement.org.
"Congress seeks to abolish tribes, relocate American Indians." Native Voices.
Faces of AIM, 1968. Muscarelle Museum of Art at William and Mary.
"Longtime police brutality drove American Indians to join the George Floyd protests." The Washington Post.
"Trail of Broken Treaties 20-Point Position Paper." AIMovement.org.
AIM Patrol, Minneapolis. MNopedia.
First "National Day of Mourning" Held in Plymouth. Mass Momements
"Indians Complain of Lack Of Attention From Carter." The Washington Post
Pipestone: A spiritual place. MPR News
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. United Nations
Heart of the Earth Survival School. MNopedia

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American Indian Movement (AIM) - Goals, Leaders, Today

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The American Indian Movement (AIM) is a grassroots movement for Indigenous rights, founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The group has organized many high-profile protests and occupations, and was a driving force behind the Native American civil rights movement of the 1970s.

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Printable Version In November 1969, some 200 Native Americans seized the abandoned federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. For 19 months, Indian activists occupied the island to draw attention to conditions on the nation's Indian reservations. Alcatraz, the Native Americans said, symbolized conditions on reservations: "It has no running water; it has inadequate sanitation facilities; there is no industry, and so unemployment is very great; there are no health care facilities; the soil is rocky and unproductive." The activists, who called themselves Indians of All Tribes, offered to buy Alcatraz from the federal government for "$24 in glass beads and red cloth."

On Thanksgiving Day 1970, Wampanoag Indians, who had taken part at the first Thanksgiving 350 years earlier, held a National Day of Mourning at Plymouth, Massachusetts. A tribal representative declared, "We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees." Meanwhile, another group of Native Americans established a settlement at Mount Rushmore to demonstrate Indian claims to the Black Hills.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new spirit of political militancy arose among the first Americans, just as it had among black Americans and women. No other group, however, faced problems more severe than Native Americans. Throughout the 1960s, American Indians were the nation's poorest minority group, more deprived than any other group, according to virtually every socioeconomic measure. In 1970, the Indian unemployment rate was 10 times the national average, and 40 percent of the Native American population lived below the poverty line. In that year, Native American life expectancy was just 44 years, a third less than that of the average American. In one Apache town of 2,500 on the San Carlos reservation in Arizona, there were only 25 telephones, and most homes had outdoor toilets and relied on wood burning stoves for heat.

Conditions on many of the nation's reservations were not unlike those found in underdeveloped areas of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The death rate among Native Americans exceeded that of the total U.S. population by a third. Deaths caused by pneumonia, hepatitis, dysentery, strep throat, diabetes, tuberculosis, alcoholism, suicide, and homicide were 2 to 60 times higher than the entire U.S. population. Half a million Indian families lived in unsanitary, dilapidated dwellings, many in shanties, huts, or even abandoned automobiles.

On the Navajo reservation in Arizona, roughly the size of West Virginia, most families lived in the midst of severe poverty. The birthrate was very high--2½ times the overall U.S. rate, and the same as India's birthrate. Living standards were low; the average family's purchasing power was about the same as a family in Malaysia. The typical house had just one or two rooms, and 60 percent of the reservation's dwellings had no electricity and 80 percent had no running water or sewers. Educational levels were low. The typical resident had completed just five years of school, and fewer than one adult in six had graduated high school.

During World War II, Native Americans began to revolt against such conditions. In 1944, Native Americans formed the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the first major inter-tribal association. Among the group's primary concerns were protection of Indian land rights and improved educational opportunities for Native Americans. Congress voted in 1953 to allow states to assert legal jurisdiction over Indian reservations without tribal consent, and the federal government sought to transfer federal Indian responsibilities for a dozen tribes to the states (a policy known as "termination") and to relocate Indians into urban areas. The NCAI vehemently led opposition to these measures. "Self-determination rather than termination!' was the NCAI slogan. Earl Old Person, a Blackfoot leader, commented, "It is important to note that in our Indian language the only translation for termination is to 'wipe out' or 'kill off' ... how can we plan our future when the Indian Bureau threatens to wipe us out as a race? It's like trying to cook a meal in your tipi when someone is standing outside trying to burn the tipi down."

By the late 1950s, a new spirit of Indian Nationalism had arisen. In 1959, the Tuscarora tribe, living in upstate New York, successfully resisted efforts by the state power authority to convert reservation land into a reservoir. In 1961, a militant new Indian organization, the National Indian Youth Council, appeared and began to use the phrase "Red Power." They sponsored demonstrations, marches, and "fish-ins" to protest state efforts to abolish Indian fishing rights guaranteed by federal treaties. In 1964, Native Americans in the San Francisco Bay area established the Indian Historical Society to present history from the Indian point-of-view. At the same time, the Native American Rights Fund brought legal suits against states that had taken Indian land and abolished Indian hunting, fishing, and water rights in violation of federal treaties. Many tribes also took legal action to prevent strip mining or spraying of pesticides on Indian lands.

The best known of all Indian Power groups was the American Indian Movement (AIM), formed by a group of Chippewas in Minneapolis in 1966 to protest alleged police brutality. In the fall of 1972, AIM led urban Indians, traditionalists, and young Indians along the "Trail of Broken Treaties' to Washington, D.C., seized the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., and occupied them for a week in order to dramatize Indian grievances. In the spring of 1973, a group of 200 heavily armed Indians took over the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota--site of an 1890 massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. Army cavalry. The group of armed Indians occupied the town for 71 days.

Militant protests paid off. The 1972 Indian Education Act gave Indian parents greater control over their children's schools. The 1976 Indian Health Care Act sought to address deficiencies in Indian health care; while the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act gave tribes control over custody decisions involving Indian children. A series of landmark Supreme Court decisions aided the cause of Indian sovereignty and tribal self- government. The Williams v. Lee(1959) case upheld the authority of tribal courts to make decisions involving non-Indians. The Menominee Tribe v. United States (1968) case declared that states could not invalidate fishing and hunting rights that Indians had acquired through treaty agreements.

Beginning in the 1970s, a number of tribes initiated lawsuits to recover land illegally seized by whites. In 1980, the federal government agreed to pay $81.5 million to the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot of Maine, and $105 million to the Sioux in South Dakota. Court decisions also permitted tribal authorities to sell cigarettes, run gambling casinos, and levy taxes.

Indians are no longer a vanishing group of Americans. The 1990 census recorded an Indian population of over two million, five times the number recorded in 1950. About half of these people live on reservations, which cover 52.4 million acres in 27 states, while most others live in urban areas. The largest Native American populations are located in Alaska, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. As the Indian population has grown in size, individual Indians have claimed many accomplishments, including author N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Although Native Americans continue to face severe problems related to employment, income, and education, they have decisively demonstrated that they will not abandon their Indian identity and culture, nor will they be treated as dependent wards of the federal government.

Copyright 2021 Digital History

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Printable Version In November 1969, some 200 Native Americans seized the abandoned federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. For 19 months, Indian activists occupied the island to draw attention to conditions on the nation's Indian reservations.

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People gather at Alcatraz Island for the Indigenous People's Sunrise Ceremony, also called Un-Thanksgiving Day, on November 28, 2019, in San Francisco, California. The annual event commemorates the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz by activists who protested U.S. policies toward Native American people.

Photograph by Liu Guanguan, China News Service/VCG/Getty

After centuries of broken treaties and racist U.S. policies, Indigenous activists launched a bold-and controversial-campaign for justice.

Published November 25, 2020

* 8 min read

From the civil rights movement to women's liberation to protests against the Vietnam War, the 1960s and 1970s were an era of consciousness-raising and protest. And among those activists were members of one of the United States' most marginalized groups: Native Americans.

Native Americans had borne the brunt of discriminatory policies, discarded treaties, and systemic injustice ever since the United States was founded in the late 18th century. Through the Red Power movement, Indigenous activists challenged those practices-and cultivated a sense of pride in their communities-as they demanded sovereignty and self-determination.
(Invaders nearly wiped out Caribbean's first people long before Spanish came, DNA reveals)

Throughout the country's first hundred years, the U.S. government signed more than 350 treaties with Native American nations. In these treaties-many brokered under duress-Indigenous people ceded their ancestral lands to the U.S. government with the promise that they would have sovereign rule over the new territories where they settled. But as white settlers expanded westward, the U.S. went back on its promises and pushed Native tribes onto ever-smaller reservations. ( How Indian Territory almost became its own U.S. state-Sequoyah.)

Starting in the 1940s, the U.S. government-which had once recognized Native American tribes as nations-began to dismantle Native sovereignty under a policy of "termination." Under the pretense of helping Native people assimilate into mainstream American society, the federal government terminated the tribal status of more than 100 tribes and bands, removed more than a million acres of land from its protection, and attempted to relocate Native Americans from reservations to urban areas. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the federal agency that had imposed laws on Native Americans without their input or approval since 1824, became a symbol of hatred and oppression.

Riven by social disparities, Native people faced poverty, crime, and despair. There was little recognition by the U.S. government or mainstream American society of the broken treaties, and misguided attempts at assimilation had led to the loss of Indigenous languages and the suppression of many Native religious and cultural practices.

Members of the Red Power movement picket in front of the chamber of commerce in Gallup, New Mexico, protesting the town's Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, an annual event they denounced as exploitative of Native American culture.

Photograph by Paolo Koch, Gamma-Rapho/Getty

A Native American girl paints a sign that reads "Indian American Land" on a wall of Alcataz Island in San Francisco Bay. In 1969, dozens of Native activists took over the former federal prison site in protest of U.S. policies, claiming it as a cultural and spiritual center.

Photograph by Bettmann, Getty

In response, a growing movement of young Native Americans sought to reclaim their sovereignty through what they called the Red Power movement. Media savvy and galvanized by the protest movements of the 1960s, they staged high-profile protests to raise awareness of Native issues. ( Native Americans are telling their own stories to counter stereotypes of Indigenous life.)

One of the first was the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, home to a decommissioned prison where Hopi men and other Native Americans had once been held. In November 1969, a group calling itself "Indians of All Tribes" took over the island and proclaimed it a cultural and spiritual center in the name of all Native Americans. The occupation lasted until June 1971, when it disintegrated due to organizational issues, infighting, and worsening conditions as the U.S. government cut off power and water to the island.

Though the activists didn't get their island, they inspired awareness and more protests from groups like American Indian Movement (AIM). Formed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1968, AIM soon became the movement's most visible, and controversial, organization.

The occupation of Alcatraz Island galvanized a movement through which Native Americans won back much of their sovereignty. But its legacy carries on in modern protests over land and water rights-and the treaties whose broken promises remain unresolved.

Photograph by Liu Guanguan, China News Service/VCG/Getty

In October 1972, AIM organized the Trail of Broken Treaties, a caravan that traveled from the West Coast to Washington, D.C. Participants called for the restoration of tribes' treaty-making authority, the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and investment in jobs, housing, and education. Upon their arrival in Washington, they barricaded themselves inside the Bureau of Indian Affairs building. The standoff ended a week later when the federal government agreed to address the group's grievances and appoint a Native American to a post within the BIA.

Next came a 71-day siege of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, that began in February 1973. Located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the town was the site of an 1890 massacre in which U.S. Army soldiers slaughtered an estimated 150 Native Americans. By the 1970s, the reservation was beset by poverty and crime, and a group of Oglala Lakota people asked AIM to help expel their tribal chairman, Richard Wilson, whom they suspected of corruption and had unsuccessfully tried to impeach.

AIM activists and Oglala Lakota people took over Wounded Knee, demanding that Wilson step down and reiterating their call for the U.S. government to honor its treaties. Soon, they were surrounded by what historian Ian Record called a "makeshift federal army" armed with machine guns and military equipment. By the time the protesters, whose food and supplies had been cut off, surrendered 71 days later, two activists had been shot and the occupation was national news.

The movement's last major protest, The Longest Walk of 1978, took participants on a five-month-long, 3,000-mile spiritual protest march to Washington, D.C. designed to draw attention to a series of federal bills that further threatened Native land and water rights and cut off social services. President Jimmy Carter refused to meet with the activists, but Congress withdrew the bills and instead passed the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protected Native rituals. ( Here's how Olympic lacrosse is next battleground for Native American sovereignty.)

The Red Power movement was in decline by the 1980s after years of FBI surveillance, investigation, and infiltration sparked infighting and suspicion among its members. By then, though, it had spurred significant changes in federal policy. In 1975, the U.S. government reversed its policy of termination, giving tribes the ability to control their own affairs through the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. The U.S. also ended many of its longstanding policies of assimilation in the 1970s and invested in Native American education and health care.

But perhaps the movement's greatest legacy is the sense of pride it left behind. Armed with a new national awareness of the injustices Native Americans faced and new investment in the preservation of Native culture, Native Americans managed to seize much of their long-denied sovereignty. Bruce Johansen, a professor of Native American studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and author of The Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement, calls the period "a voyage of discovery and recovery of culture."

It is a journey that continues to this day as a new generation of Native activists push for everything from water rights to the recognition of their right to prosecute crimes on lands promised to them in 19 th-century treaties. "Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing," said AIM cofounder Dennis Banks during a 2000 protest. "From that, our own people began to sense their pride."

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The radical history of the Red Power movement's fight for Native American sovereignty

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After centuries of broken treaties and racist U.S. policies, Indigenous activists launched a bold-and controversial-campaign for justice.

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The Military Prison

The military prison at Fort Alcatraz held soldiers who broke army rules or committed crimes. The prison also incarcerated Native Americans. These included Paiute Tom, held for two days in 1873 before being shot trying to escape, and Kaetena, a Chiricahua Apache chief who rode with Geronimo.

Other Native Americans imprisoned on the island included nineteen Oraibi Hopi elders from northern Arizona. They were arrested in 1895 for resisting federal policies that forced Hopi children to attend boarding schools where their hair was cut, they were forced to wear western clothes, and they were punished for speaking their own language. Many of the schools were run by Christian churches, whose teachings further eroded traditional culture.

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Red Power On Alcatraz, Perspectives 50 Years Later (U.S. National Park Service)

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The military prison at Fort Alcatraz held soldiers who broke army rules or committed crimes. The prison also incarcerated Native Americans. These included Paiute Tom, held for two days in 1873 before being shot trying to escape, and Kaetena, a Chiricahua Apache chief who rode with Geronimo.

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By 1966, the civil rights movement had been gaining momentum for more than a decade, as thousands of African Americans embraced a strategy of nonviolent protest against racial segregation and demanded equal rights under the law.

But for an increasing number of African Americans, particularly young Black men and women, that strategy did not go far enough. Protesting segregation, they believed, failed to adequately address the poverty and powerlessness that generations of systemic discrimination and racism had imposed on so many Black Americans.

Inspired by the principles of racial pride, autonomy and self-determination expressed by Malcolm X (whose assassination in 1965 had brought even more attention to his ideas), as well as liberation movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Black Power movement that flourished in the late 1960s and '70s argued that Black Americans should focus on creating economic, social and political power of their own, rather than seek integration into white-dominated society.

Crucially, Black Power advocates, particularly more militant groups like the Black Panther Party, did not discount the use of violence, but embraced Malcolm X's challenge to pursue freedom, equality and justice "by any means necessary."

The March Against Fear - June 1966

The emergence of Black Power as a parallel force alongside the mainstream civil rights movement occurred during the March Against Fear, a voting rights march in Mississippi in June 1966. The march originally began as a solo effort by James Meredith, who had become the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, a.k.a. Ole Miss, in 1962. He had set out in early June to walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, a distance of more than 200 miles, to promote Black voter registration and protest ongoing discrimination in his home state.

But after a white gunman shot and wounded Meredith on a rural road in Mississippi, three major civil rights leaders- Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to continue the March Against Fear in his name.

In the days to come, Carmichael, McKissick and fellow marchers were harassed by onlookers and arrested by local law enforcement while walking through Mississippi. Speaking at a rally of supporters in Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, Carmichael (who had been released from jail that day) began leading the crowd in a chant of "We want Black Power!" The refrain stood in sharp contrast to many civil rights protests, where demonstrators commonly chanted "We want freedom!"

Stokely Carmichael's Role in Black Power

Though the author Richard Wright had written a book titled Black Power in 1954, and the phrase had been used among other Black activists before, Stokely Carmichael was the first to use it as a political slogan in such a public way. As biographer Peniel E. Joseph writes in Stokely: A Life, the events in Mississippi "catapulted Stokely into the political space last occupied by Malcolm X," as he went on TV news shows, was profiled in Ebony and written up in the New York Times under the headline "Black Power Prophet."

Carmichael's growing prominence put him at odds with King, who acknowledged the frustration among many African Americans with the slow pace of change but didn't see violence and separatism as a viable path forward. With the country mired in the Vietnam War, (a war both Carmichael and King spoke out against) and the civil rights movement King had championed losing momentum, the message of the Black Power movement caught on with an increasing number of Black Americans.

Black Power Movement Growth-and Backlash

King and Carmichael renewed their alliance in early 1968, as King was planning his Poor People's Campaign, which aimed to bring thousands of protesters to Washington, D.C., to call for an end to poverty. But in April 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis while in town to support a strike by the city's sanitation workers as part of that campaign.

In the aftermath of King's murder, a mass outpouring of grief and anger led to riots in more than 100 U.S. cities. Later that year, one of the most visible Black Power demonstrations took place at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, where Black athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised black-gloved fists in the air on the medal podium.

By 1970, Carmichael (who later changed his name to Kwame Ture) had moved to Africa, and SNCC had been supplanted at the forefront of the Black Power movement by more militant groups, such as the Black Panther Party, the US Organization, the Republic of New Africa and others, who saw themselves as the heirs to Malcolm X's revolutionary philosophy. Black Panther chapters began operating in a number of cities nationwide, where they advocated a 10-point program of socialist revolution (backed by armed self-defense). The group's more practical efforts focused on building up the Black community through social programs (including free breakfasts for school children).

Many in mainstream white society viewed the Black Panthers and other Black Power groups negatively, dismissing them as violent, anti-white and anti-law enforcement. Like King and other civil rights activists before them, the Black Panthers became targets of the FBI's counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, which weakened the group considerably by the mid-1970s through such tactics as spying, wiretapping, flimsy criminal charges and even assassination.

Legacy of Black Power

Even after the Black Power movement's decline in the late 1970s, its impact would continue to be felt for generations to come. With its emphasis on Black racial identity, pride and self-determination, Black Power influenced everything from popular culture to education to politics, while the movement's challenge to structural inequalities inspired other groups (such as Chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and LGBTQ people) to pursue their own goals of overcoming discrimination to achieve equal rights.

The legacies of both the Black Power and civil rights movements live on in the Black Lives Matter movement. Though Black Lives Matter focuses more specifically on criminal justice reform, it channels the spirit of earlier movements in its efforts to combat systemic racism and the social, economic and political injustices that continue to affect Black Americans.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

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How the Black Power Movement Influenced the Civil Rights Movement | HISTORY

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With a focus on racial pride and self-determination, leaders of the Black Power movement argued that civil rights activism did not go far enough.

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The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

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Although African American writers and politicians used the term “Black Power” for years, the expression first entered the lexicon of the civil rights movement during the Meredith March Against Fear in the summer of 1966. Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that Black Power was “essentially an emotional concept” that meant “different things to different people,” but he worried that the slogan carried “connotations of violence and separatism” and opposed its use (King, 32; King, 14 October 1966). The controversy over Black Power reflected and perpetuated a split in the civil rights movement between organizations that maintained that nonviolent methods were the only way to achieve civil rights goals and those organizations that had become frustrated and were ready to adopt violence and black separatism.