The definition of social movements cannot easily be summarized into one concise sentence. A social movement is an attempt to intentionally intervene in the process of social change. A social movement is a creation of modern society. A social movement is a collection of people engaging in practices and discourses designed to challenge and change society as they define it. A social movement takes on and challenges the authority of the ruling political system. As you can see, social movements involve various different aspects that can be somewhat summarized by stating that they seek to change society in one aspect or another. Often these movements seem to be mistaken synonymously for civil disobedience.

The most active period of social movement in the 20th century were the 1960's. This period roughly begins with a build-up from the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court Decision of 1954. This desegregation decision began the Civil Rights movement. By 1960, multiple movements are gathering steam in the United States. After 1970 and the Kent St

hour sit-ins challenged white power, threatened vigilante violence from resisting white citizens, and would lead to police violence. In the process, the laws kept people from the simple act of eating at a lunch counter were demonstrated.

of the Cold War, large amounts of resources went into building military power. Materialism in the United States only helped to fuel the cries for social movements. The children of the American middle and even upper classes were eager participants and often the leaders of these movements. In the 50's, children were taught to "repress ourselves, grit our teeth and hold back our feeling if we wanted to survive" (Faust in the 60's, 77). They found that the material satisfactions of their wealthy status did not produce satisfaction with their lives. At that point it seemed that "people became more permissive and expressive in their sexuality and emotion. They were more open in art and literature" (Faust in the 60's, 79). The movements then succeeded in countering the cooperation and suppression strategies of the dominant order through three categories. Physical confrontation, in both violent and non-violent ways, challenged the legitimacy of the established orders. Peaceful lunch !

ave social parity. Pluralism is the goal of our society's recent trend toward multiculturalism. Assimilation is the process by which minorities gradually adopt patterns of the dominant culture. This involves changing modes of dress, values religion, language, or friends. Not surprisingly, elite's tend to favor the assimilation model since it holds them up as the standard to which others should aspire. Segregation refers to the physical and social separation of categories of people. Until the early 1960's, the "Jim Crow" laws formally segregated hotels, restaurants, parks, buses and even drinking fountains. Some minorities, especially religious orders like Amish, they voluntarily segregated themselves. The most brutal form of racism is the genocide which is the systematic annihilation of one category of people by another. This happened during the course of history when the nazis exterminated more than 6 million Jewish man, woman, and children in what has become the Holocaust. A!

People of the world are part of different races, which share different biologically transmitted traits that members of society deem socially significant. Nineteenth-century biologist labeled people with relatively light skin and fine hair as Caucasians; they called those with darker skin and coarser, curlier hair Negroid and people with yellow or brown skin and distinctive folds on the eyelids were termed Mongoloid. Sociologist consider such categories misleading since we now know that no society is composed of biologically pure individuals because of the human migration and the interracial births. Peop

Some common words found in the essay are:
Mongoloid Sociologist, Black Panthers, Materialism United, Strawberry Statement, Late Night, Luna Luna, Universal Spirits, Vietnam War, Jim Crow, Pol Pot's, social movement, social movements, racial ethnic, civil disobedience, rhetorical confrontation, active period, definition social movements, violence dominant, faust 60's, social scientist, change society, racial ethnic categories,
Approximate Word count = 1895
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)