Civil rights in the context of Liberal conservative

The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP), is a conservative and right-wing political party in the United States. It emerged as the main rival of the Democratic Party in the 1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since then.

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists opposing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery into U.S. territories. It rapidly gained support in the North, drawing in former Whigs and Free Soilers. Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 led to the secession of Southern states and the outbreak of the American Civil War. Under Lincoln and a Republican-controlled Congress, the party led efforts to preserve the Union, defeat the Confederacy, and abolish slavery. During the Reconstruction era, Republicans sought to extend civil rights protections to freedmen, but by the late 1870s the party shifted its focus toward business interests and industrial expansion. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it dominated national politics, promoting protective tariffs, infrastructure development, and laissez-faire economic policies, while navigating internal divisions between progressive and conservative factions. The party's support declined during the Great Depression, as the New Deal coalition reshaped American politics. Republicans returned to national power with the 1952 election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose moderate conservatism reflected a pragmatic acceptance of many New Deal-era programs.

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, gaining popularity among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy, rule of law, and equality under the law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies, and other trade barriers, instead promoting free trade and marketization. The philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct tradition based on the social contract, arguing that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, and governments must not violate these rights. While the British liberal tradition emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism emphasized rejecting authoritarianism and is linked to nation-building.

In the field of political science, civics is the study of the civil and political rights and obligations of citizens in a society. The term civics derives from the Latin word civicus, meaning "relating to a citizen". In U.S. politics, in the context of urban planning, the term civics comprehends the city politics that affect the political decisions of the citizenry of a city.

Civic education is the study of the theoretical, political, and practical aspects of citizenship manifest as political rights, civil rights, and legal obligations. Civic education includes the study of civil law, the civil codes, and government with special attention to the political role of the citizens in the operation and oversight of government.

Liberal democracy, also called Western-style democracy, or substantive democracy, is a form of government that combines the organization of a democracy with ideas of liberal political philosophy. Common elements within a liberal democracy are: elections between or among multiple distinct political parties; a separation of powers into different branches of government; the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society; a market economy with private property; universal suffrage; and the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms for all citizens. Substantive democracy refers to substantive rights and substantive laws, which can include substantive equality, the equality of outcome for subgroups in society. Liberal democracy emphasizes the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Multi-party systems with at least two persistent, viable political parties are characteristic of liberal democracies.

Governmental authority is legitimately exercised only in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws adopted and enforced in accordance with established procedure. To define the system in practice, liberal democracies often draw upon a constitution, either codified or uncodified, to delineate the powers of government and enshrine the social contract. A liberal democracy may take various and mixed constitutional forms: it may be a constitutional monarchy or a republic. It may have a parliamentary system, presidential system, or semi-presidential system. Liberal democracies are contrasted with illiberal democracies and dictatorships. Some liberal democracies, especially those with large populations, use federalism (also known as vertical separation of powers) in order to prevent abuse and increase public input by dividing governing powers between municipal, provincial and national governments. The characteristics of liberal democracies are correlated with increased political stability, lower corruption, better management of resources, and better health indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African-American civil rights organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civil rights movement.

The Bill of Rights 1689 (1 Will. & Mar. Sess. 2. c. 2) (sometimes known as the Bill of Rights 1688) is an act of the Parliament of England that set out certain basic civil rights and changed the succession to the English Crown. It remains a crucial statute in English constitutional law.

Largely based on the ideas of political theorist John Locke, the Bill sets out a constitutional requirement for the Crown to seek the consent of the people as represented in Parliament. As well as setting limits on the powers of the monarch, it established the rights of Parliament, including regular parliaments, free elections, and parliamentary privilege. It also listed individual rights, including the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the right not to pay taxes levied without the approval of Parliament. Finally, it described and condemned several misdeeds of James II of England. The Bill of Rights received royal assent on 16 December 1689. It is a restatement in statutory form of the Declaration of Right presented by the Convention Parliament to William III and Mary II in February 1689, inviting them to become joint sovereigns of England, displacing James II, who was stated to have abdicated and left the throne vacant.

The Kingdom of Montenegro was a monarchy in southeastern Europe, present-day Montenegro, during the tumultuous period of time on the Balkan Peninsula leading up to and during World War I. Officially it was a constitutional monarchy, but absolutist in practice. On 28 November 1918, following the end of World War I, with the Montenegrin government still in exile, the Podgorica Assembly proclaimed unification with the Kingdom of Serbia, which itself was merged into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes three days later, on 1 December 1918. This unification with Serbia lasted, through various successor states, for almost 88 years, ending in 2006.

During this period, Montenegro remained largely rural and traditional. The constitution, adopted in 1905, provided a basic framework for governance and recognized some civil rights, such as freedom of religion and the press, but the political system remained heavily centered on the king. King Nikola maintained tight control over political life, and the state operated with only limited parliamentary influence. The society was patriarchal and conservative, with significant influence from the church and tribal customs, and few advancements in terms of modernization or civil institutions.

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeastern United States and the Midwestern United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.

Though geographically tied to Harlem, few of the associated visual artists lived in the area itself, while those who did (such as Aaron Douglas) had migrated elsewhere by the end of World War II. Many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris, France, were also influenced by the movement. Harlem had also seen significant Black immigration from British, French and other colonies in the Caribbean. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson described the Harlem Renaissance, took place between approximately 1924—when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance—and 1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a creative crucible for African-American art-making and its institutionalisation within white-dominated museums and cultural institutions.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (French: Charte canadienne des droits et libertés), often simply referred to as the Charter in Canada, is a bill of rights entrenched in the Constitution of Canada, forming the first part of the Constitution Act, 1982. The Charter guarantees certain political rights to Canadian citizens and guarantees the civil rights of everyone in Canada. It is designed to unify Canadians around a set of principles that embody those rights. The Charter was proclaimed in force by Queen Elizabeth II of Canada on April 17, 1982, as part of the Constitution Act, 1982.

The Charter was preceded by the Canadian Bill of Rights, enacted in 1960, which was a federal statute rather than a constitutional document. The Bill of Rights exemplified an international trend towards formalizing human rights protections following the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, instigated by the country's movement for human rights and freedoms that emerged after World War II. As a federal statute, the Bill of Rights could be amended through the ordinary legislative process and had no application to provincial laws. The Supreme Court of Canada also narrowly interpreted the Bill of Rights, showing reluctance to declare laws inoperative. Between 1960 and 1982, only five of the thirty-five cases concerning the Bill of Rights that were heard by the Supreme Court of Canada resulted in a successful outcome for claimants. The relative ineffectiveness of the Canadian Bill of Rights motivated many to improve rights protections in Canada. The British Parliament formally enacted the Charter as a part of the Canada Act 1982 at the request of the Parliament of Canada in 1982, the result of the efforts of the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Nomination rules in elections regulate the conditions under which a candidate or political party is entitled to stand for election. The right to stand for election, right to be a candidate or passive suffrage is one part of free and fair elections. Passive suffrage is distinct from active suffrage, the right to vote. The criteria to stand as a candidate depends on the individual legal system. They may include the age of a candidate, citizenship, endorsement by a political party and profession. Laws' restrictions, such as competence or moral aptitude, can be used in a discriminatory manner. Restrictive and discriminatory nomination rules can impact the civil rights of candidates, political parties, and voters.

In some jurisdictions a candidate or party must not only be nominated but also has to pass separate rules in order to be listed on the ballot paper. In the United States, this is called ballot access.

The civil rights movement was a social movement in the United States from 1954 to 1968 which aimed to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country, which most commonly affected African Americans. The movement had origins in the Reconstruction era in the late 19th century, and modern roots in the 1940s. After years of nonviolent protests and civil disobedience campaigns, the civil rights movement achieved many of its legislative goals in the 1960s, during which it secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Following the American Civil War (1861–1865), the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and granted citizenship to all African Americans, the majority of whom had recently been enslaved in the southern states. During Reconstruction, African-American men in the South voted and held political office, but after 1877 they were increasingly deprived of civil rights under racist Jim Crow laws (which for example banned interracial marriage, introduced literacy tests for voters, and segregated schools) and were subjected to violence from white supremacists during the nadir of American race relations. African Americans who moved to the North in order to improve their prospects in the Great Migration also faced barriers in employment and housing. Legal racial discrimination was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the doctrine of "separate but equal". The movement for civil rights, led by figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, achieved few gains until after World War II. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order abolishing discrimination in the armed forces.

Libertarianism (from French: libertaire, lit. 'libertarian'; or from Latin: libertas, lit. 'freedom') is a political philosophy that holds freedom, personal sovereignty, and liberty as primary values. Many libertarians believe that the concept of freedom is in accord with the non-aggression principle, according to which each individual has the right to live as they choose, as long as they do not violate the rights of others by initiating force or fraud against them.

Libertarianism has been broadly shaped by liberal ideas. Libertarians advocate the expansion of individual autonomy and political self-determination, emphasizing the principles of equality before the law and the protection of civil rights, including the rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice. They generally support individual liberty and oppose authority, state power, warfare, militarism and nationalism, but some libertarians diverge on the scope and nature of their opposition to existing economic and political systems.

Egalitarianism (from French égal 'equal'; also equalitarianism) is a school of thought within political philosophy that builds on the concept of social equality, prioritizing it for all people. Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. As such, all people should be accorded equal rights and treatment under the law. Egalitarian doctrines have been important in many modern political philosophies and social movements, including the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, libertarianism, feminism, civil rights, and international human rights. Egalitarianism is a major principle of both classical liberalism with its equality of rights, and redistributive left-wing politics with its stress on equality of outcome.

One key aspect of egalitarianism is its emphasis on equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of their background or circumstances. This means ensuring that everyone has access to the same resources, education, and opportunities to succeed in life. By promoting equal opportunities, egalitarianism aims to level the playing field and reduce disparities that result from social inequalities.

Human rights in Canada have come under increasing public attention and legal protection since World War II. Inspired by Canada's involvement in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the current legal framework for human rights in Canada consists of constitutional entitlements, and statutory human rights codes, both federal and provincial.

The Supreme Court of Canada first recognized an implied bill of rights in 1938 in the decision Reference Re Alberta Statutes. However, prior to the advent of the Canadian Bill of Rights in 1960 and its successor the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 (part of the Constitution of Canada), the laws of Canada did not provide much in the way of civil rights and was typically of limited concern to the courts. The protections which did exist focused on specific issues, rather than taking a general approach to human rights with some provincial and federal laws offering limited safeguards.

Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and political philosopher who was a leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination, which most commonly affected African Americans.

A Black church leader, King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1965 Selma voting rights movement. There were dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who often responded violently. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.