the famous Washington March. They felt that women needed to assert themselves for the equality of women.
All these diverse streams also contributed in their own way in building a powerful movement for equality which the shaped modern history of the USA.

  • Make a table and list the demands of civil rights movement and the possible solutions in your opinion.
  • USA claims to be a democracy, yet it kept certain groups of people segregated, till middle of last century. Discuss how the idea of democracy needs to be more inclusive in our context.
  • Why do we hear different voices within a movement? Can you identify differences in them ?
Human Rights Movements in the USSR

In those days, USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe which were within the sphere of influence of the USSR had a government which did not allow free multi-party elections, free uncensored press or media, or even freedom of expression or movement for ordinary people. These governments were constantly under fear of conspiracies to destabilise them and kept a close control over all activities of people. As people grew tired of such controls, many movements for human rights, freedom of expression, movement and free press took place in different parts of USSR and Eastern Europe. In countries like Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, this also took the form of demand for freedom from the control of USSR over them. Some of these movements also received support from the anti-Communist countries including the USA and UK. These movements for human rights had many shades of differences. Some of these trends called for greater freedom for common people, while others sought to dismantle the socialist system as it existed in these countries. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous writer, and Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear scientist, were important leaders of this movement. Under the influence of these and other movements, a new leadership emerged in the USSR under President Gorbachev who initiated a process of reform called Glasnost to bring greater freedom for the people.

  • Can you think of the similarity or differences in the nature of political system in USA and USSR and how was their response to people’s rights?
Anti-nuclear and Anti-war Movements

The 1970s and 1980s saw a new kind of movement - the movement against war and nuclear arms. The entire world was witness to the horrors of nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Despite this, leading superpowers like the USA, USSR, Britain and France began building arsenals of nuclear weapons and justifying them as a means of deterring the other powers from using them.

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