Immigration Movement Should Learn from Civil Rights Movement

Toni Holness is with the Center for Community Change and Rich Stolz is with the Fair Immigration Reform Movement.

As the immigrant rights movement struggles and encounters the political maneuvering of the U.S. Congress, the civil rights movement, its history and lessons, figures prominently. Perhaps the first and most important lesson of the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is the length of time it took for that movement to win a resounding legislative victory – it took a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision for Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This clearly proves that endurance matters. The African-American civil rights movement survived, and continues to this day. It also birthed a number of progressive movements, including today’s immigrant rights movement.

This year the immigrant rights movement has already experienced a gut wrenching debate that included a number of painful concessions and the defeat – at least for now – of a comprehensive immigration reform bill in the Senate. Over forty years ago activists and lawmakers rallied around an issue just as hotly debated as today’s comprehensive immigration reform: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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