Fionnbarra Ó Dochartaigh, a prominent member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), once suggested he and his fellow civil rights activists ‘viewed ourselves as Ulster’s white negroes’.[1] Indeed, the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, spearheaded by groups such as NICRA and People’s Democracy (PD), established such a connection between the discrimination against African-Americans in the United States and their own experiences of inequality on the grounds of their Catholicism. The success of African-Americans in securing desegregation in the early 1960s thus encouraged these groups in Northern Ireland to pursue similar courses of action in the hope of achieving the same results.[2] Between April 1967, with the foundation of NICRA, and January 1972, the recognised end date of the movement in Northern Ireland with Bloody Sunday, civil rights groups in Northern Ireland assimilated the objectives and approaches of its American counterparts into their own tactics to achieve integration. The transmission of these ideas from America was facilitated by two transnational ‘connectors’ in particular: individual actors travelling between the two locations and the media in their transmission of images and words through newspapers, radio and television.
Much of the existing historical scholarship in this field, including perhaps the most influential work of Brian Dooley’s Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America (London, 1998), focuses largely on establishing these connections between the Northern Irish and American movements. While these sources provide invaluable evidence for the transnational movement of ideas, they do little to evaluate the consequences of their influence. Therefore, the key question of this project is: in light of the differences between the results of the civil rights movements in the United States and Northern Ireland, with the former eventually securing political legislation against institutional segregation and the latter collapsing into a violent campaign defined by paramilitarism, did the influence of the American movement help or hinder the Northern Irish movement? In other words, is there a role for local cultural circumstances in the ‘translation’ of these transnational concepts that resulted in their different effect in Northern Ireland?
To answer this question, undertaking an analysis of the transnational movement of concepts such as ‘civil rights’, ‘non-violence’ and ‘black power’ through the activity of the aforementioned actors and media institutions, and the reasons for the dichotomy in the concepts’ reception and application between the two locations will be necessary. Both contemporary and retrospective accounts from key figures in the Northern Irish movement, including Bernadette Devlin and Michael Farrell, emphasise the importance of such conceptual influences, but also suggest limited understandings of the nature of these concepts.[3] Therefore, it should be considered whether there was ever a real understanding of, commitment to, or possibility of practising these ideas in the movement in Northern Ireland, given the local circumstances. One such example is in the Northern Irish application of both ‘non-violence’ from Martin Luther King and aspects of ‘black power’ from Stokely Carmichael, two concepts with fundamentals that were somewhat antithetical in the American context.[4]
Therefore, at this juncture, I would suggest that while the US movement rightfully inspired those in Northern Ireland to challenge the institutional discrimination against them, the attempt to apply these ideas on the basis of their success in the US without real consideration of the local circumstances in Northern Ireland ultimately rendered them an obstruction to the Northern Irish cause. However, the misunderstanding and misapplication of the ideas of the American movement does not bear sole responsibility for the failure of the civil rights movement; it is a contributory factor to a wider explanation, constructed of issues from both within the movement and the social and political circumstances of the region at the time, yet significant enough that it merits such an individual study.
[1] Ó Dochartaigh, Fionnbarra, Ulster’s White Negroes: From Civil Rights to Insurrection (London, 1994), p. 14
[2] Guelke, Adrian, Politics in Deeply Divided Societies (Cambridge, 2012), p. 85
[3] See Bernadette Devlin, The Price of My Soul (New York, 1969); Michael Farrell (ed.), Twenty Years On (Dingle, 1988)
[4] Prince, Simon, ‘’Do What the Afro-Americans Are Doing’: Black Power and the Start of the Northern Ireland Troubles’, Journal of Contemporary History 50(3) (2015), p. 524