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Yeni keşfedilen Amerika kıtasında ticari çıkarlar ve emperyal rekabetlerle başlayan köleliğin tarihi, 20. yüzyılda Amerikan toplumu içinde ayrımcılık sistemi halini almış, post kolonyal dünya düzeninde ırkçı politikalarla varlığını hissettirmeye devam etmiştir. Oryantalizmin yaydığı Doğu imajı çerçevesinde oluşturulan düşüncelerde olduğu gibi Batılı beyaz araştırmacılar 1950’li yıllara kadar köleleştirilmiş siyahilerin tarihini siyasi ve anayasal sınırlar çerçevesinde kendi perspektiflerinden yazmışlardır. Buna rağmen, yaşamsal mücadele ve toplumsal travmalarla geçen Afroamerikan tarihi, Afrikalıların 16. ve 17. yüzyıllarda Kuzey Amerika'ya gelişiyle başlamış, 1955 ve 1968 yılları arasında yoğunlaşan sivil haklar hareketi ile birlikte siyahiler tarafından yeniden yazılmaya başlamıştır. Köleliğin Başkan Abraham Lincoln tarafından kaldırıldığı 1862 yılından itibaren devam eden dönemde, Jim Crow yasaları ve de jure ayrımcılığa karşı tepkiler verilse de 1950’li yılların ortalarında liderlerin öncülüğünde bilinçlenme hareketi kapsayıcı bir şekilde siyahi kitleleri harekete geçirmiştir. Büyük ölçüde ırkçı Güney eyaletlerinde derinleşen, ayrımcılık yasalarını bozmak ve Afroamerikalılar için oy ve temel kamusal haklarını geri getirmek hedefinde ülke genelinde şiddet içermeyen protestolar her geçen gün daha da büyük bir ivme kazanmıştır. Bu çalışmanın temel amacı, ABD tarihinde ırkçılığın tarihsel sürecinde en önemli konu olmayı sürdüren siyahi ayrımcılığını ve direniş hareketini ana hatlarıyla değerlendirmektir. Özellikle 1955 yılında başlayan Sivil Haklar Hareketi’nin 13 yılına odaklanarak temel özellikleri, liderleri, kitleleri harekete geçirmede kullanılan temel araçları, önemli dönüm noktaları ve bunların ulusal ve küresel boyuttaki yansıma ile etkileri analiz edilecektir.

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Composed over a nearly twenty-year period following Brown v. Board of Education, Book I of Three Days Before the Shooting… renders an intricate narrative of the identification with blackness, and subsequent ideological transformation, required of white liberals for the meaningful desegregation of American society. This article positions Book I’s narrator, Welborn McIntyre, as a crucial iteration of the racially indeterminate Rhinehart spirit that is the animating concern of Ellison’s second novel. Drawing on a subtle allusion to the fiction of André Malraux in Book I’s opening, this article frames McIntyre’s Rhinehartian transformation as a shamanic ordeal that personally illuminates the Negro core of American cultural identity. The ordeal demands of McIntyre a grueling recalibration of his relationships to the interrelated imaginative landscapes of the American South, Western Europe, and Negro America, which are personified by the characters McGowan, M. Vannec, and Hickman, respectively. While McIntyre’s enlightenment and transformation appear incomplete, they actually require the reader’s critical collaboration to be realized. As a representative of the average white reader that Ellison envisioned during his novel’s composition, McIntyre and his narrative therefore perform a crucial rite of initiation into Book II’s fictive space and the desegregated American truth Ellison seeks to communicate.

The paper commences by considering the similarity between Dr King, MK Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and argues that they are high mimetic figures who inspire us to be better. Their legacy and memory operate as a yardstick by which we can evaluate the conduct of those exercising public and private power over us. Each remains dominant in his respective society decades after passing on or leaving public life, and the paper suggests that very little societal value is had by deconstructing their lives and judging facets of their lives through the prism of latter day morality. We gain more by leaving their high mimetic status undisturbed. There is a clear link between their various struggles with King being heavily influenced by the writings and thinking of Gandhi, who commenced his career as a liberation activist in South Africa. King was instrumental in commencing the discourse on economic sanctions to force the Apartheid government to change and the Indian government had a long and committed relationship with the ANC. The second half of the paper turns to an analysis of how Dr King's legacy impacted directly and indirectly on developments in South Africa. One of the key objectives of the Civil Rights movement in the USA was to attain substantive equality and to improve the quality of life of all. The paper then turns to assessing the extent to which democratic South Africa has achieved these objectives and concludes that the picture is mixed. Important pioneering changes such as enabling gays and lesbians to marry have taught important lessons about taking rights seriously. However, despite important advancements, neither poverty nor inequality has been appreciably reduced. One of the major failures has been the inability to provide appropriate, effective and relevant education to African children in public schools. Effectively educating previously disadvantaged persons represents one of the few means at our disposal of reducing inequality and breaking the cycle of poverty. Fortunately, there is a general awareness in the country that something needs to be done about this crisis urgently. The paper notes comments by President Zuma that the level of wealth in white households is six times that of black households. The critique is that comments of this nature do not demonstrate an acknowledgment by the ANC that, after 19 years in power, they must also accept responsibility for statistics such as this.

The proverbial phrase “make a way out of no way,” common in the rhetoric of Martin Luther King and other African American writers and speakers in the twentieth century, was anticipated by very similar expressions among nineteenth-century Quakers—and before that by a sixteenth century Protestant Reformer.