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Civil Rights in the Postmodern Era: An Introduction Steven R. Goldzwig According to Aldon Morris, "The modern civil rights movement fulfilled one of the unfinished tasks of the Civil War. It increased the freedom of the descendants of former slaves by overthrowing legalized Jim Crow and a significant amount of the inequity associated with it." Moreover, "The most distinctive aspect of the modern civil rights movement was its demonstration that, through the widespread use of social protest, power could be generated by an oppressed group at the bottom of a modern industrialized society."1 Harvard Sifkoff has labeled the modern civil rights movement "one of the most significant developments in American history " and defined its parameters as "the struggle for racial equality and justice waged between 1954 and 1992."2 If we use Sifkoff's time period as our measure, we have now entered fully into the "post-civil rights era." The meaning of such a designation is itself open to interpretation, if not debate. Times have changed. In issuing the call for this special issue on "civil rights in the postmodern era," I was simultaneously excited and just a tad wary. After all, whatever the prospects that might lie ahead, I was certain that I was about to enter uncharted territory. Much of my enthusiasm regarding a special issue on civil rights centered on the opportunity to take the contemporary pulse of the transformations in the civil rights movement. Furthermore, President Clinton had announced his initiative on race and I had some hope that a fruitful dialogue on race relations would receive new impetus in the United States. The scandals associated with the administration soon demarcated a misplaced enthusiasm on my part. My wariness also could be traced to the complexity of the call for essays I was about to undertake. In issuing my call for a discussion on "civil rights" at the beginning of the new millennium, I reflected on a daunting truism: we now live in a very different time than that of the mass mobilization efforts begun in Montgomery in the 1950s and perhaps crowned in the early 1960s at the apotheosis of the civil rights movement represented by the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" address. By employing the term "postmodern era," I was Steven R. Goldzwig L· Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 2, No. 2, 1999, pp. 171-176 ISSN 1094-8392 172 Rhetoric & Public Affairs merely trying to highlight the distinctly different ground we now traverse. First, there is no longer one, unified civil rights movement, but a series of diverse, successive , ongoing, and complex movements on behalf of equality and justice in the United States. Indeed, we now live in an age of diversity that sometimes seems so fragmentary that it is hard to find common ground. On the other hand, there is a richness in that diversity that can ennoble the whole and whose unique strands give all of us a better sense of the nature of identity and society. In a nutshell, we now live in multiracial and multicultural environments.3 Those environments are complicated further by social, political, and legal constructions of race, ethnicity, gender , class, and religion, among others. The rich complexities of these additional variables and the rich traditions and unique problems associated with each gave me pause; for in attempting to add to our scholarly and communal knowledge about these issues, I knew I would likely encounter some rather controversial essays. As one colleague of mine at Marquette advised upon learning of my assignment for this special issue, "Don't be afraid to take a risk!" I was buoyed by that advice but convinced that my acceptance of this project had itself already indefatigably drafted me into the risk-taking mode. The call for papers for this issue was both wide and deep. I had contacted scholarly communities in the disciplines of communication, political science, history, and specialized areas such as African American and women's studies. The call indicated that I was willing to interpret the term civil rights broadly. That is, papers regarding race relations, class, gender, affirmative...

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