AMSCO 9.5 Calls for Reforms and Responses Notes

Overview

AMSCO Topic 9.5, "Calls for Reform and Responses" (AMSCO p. 667-675), covers how rights-based movements after 1900 challenged old assumptions about race, class, gender, and religion. This is Unit 9 (Globalization, 1900-present) territory, and the through line is simple: as the world became more connected, demands for human rights went global too. The chapter walks through the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, global feminism, the Negritude Movement and liberation theology, the end of apartheid in South Africa, caste reservation in India, human rights repression in China, and the rise of environmental and fair trade movements.

The skill being tested here is explaining how social categories, roles, and practices were maintained and challenged over time. Every example in this chapter is either a challenge to an old hierarchy or a government's response to that challenge.

Timeline of Key Events in Human Rights and Social Movements. Image Courtesy of Isaiah Penny

An Era of Rights: The UN, Global Feminism, and Rights-Based Movements

In December 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserting basic rights and freedoms for all people regardless of race, color, sex, language, religion, opinion, national or social origin, property, or birth. This document made human rights a topic of global discourse for the first time.

The UN backed up the declaration with institutions:

• UNICEF (created 1946) originally provided food for children in Europe still suffering after World War II, then expanded into worldwide humanitarian aid for children.
• The International Court of Justice (also called the World Court) settles international law disputes between countries. It has 15 judges, each from a different country, and often handles border disputes and treaty violations.
• The UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) and NGOs provide food, medicine, and shelter to refugees, people who have fled their home countries. Among the earliest refugees the UN helped were Palestinians displaced after the 1948 partition of Palestine that created Israel.

Global Feminism

Women's rights activism became a coordinated global movement across the 20th century. Landmark moments:

• March 1911: First International Women's Day, with one million demonstrators in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland
• April 1915: First International Congress of Women, with representatives from 12 nations
• June 1975: UN First World Conference on Women in Mexico City, 133 nations represented
• December 1979: The UN adopts CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), an "international bill of rights for women" covering the right to vote and hold office, freely choose a spouse, access the same education as men, and access family planning and birth control
• September 1995: Fourth International Congress of Women in Beijing, where Hillary Clinton declared "women's rights are human rights"
• January 21, 2017: The Women's March drew about 500,000 demonstrators in Washington and as many as five million worldwide, from Antarctica to Mumbai

Cultural and Religious Rights Movements

The Negritude Movement, rooted primarily in French West Africa, emphasized pride in "blackness," rejection of French colonial authority, and the right to self-determination. Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal wrote poetry celebrating African culture (and later became independent Senegal's first president). American writers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes explored similar themes in the 1920s and 1930s, and the "black pride" of the 1960s traces back to this movement.

Liberation theology combined socialism with Catholicism and spread through Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. It interpreted Jesus's teachings as a call to free people from oppressive economic, political, and social conditions, including redistributing some wealth from rich to poor. Military dictators persecuted and killed religious workers who embraced it, but the movement helped topple a dictator in Nicaragua, influenced Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and in 2013 the Catholic Church chose its first Latin American pope, Pope Francis, who reversed the Vatican's opposition to liberation theology.

Steps Toward Gender Equality

Across the 20th century, women's literacy and college attendance rose, and country after country granted women the vote. The dates show how staggered this was:

Two caveats the AMSCO chapter stresses:

• Not all women in a country got the vote at once. In the US, white women voted nationally from 1920, but Native American and African American women lacked full voting rights everywhere until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Australia, white women gained some voting rights in 1894, but aboriginal men and women couldn't vote until 1962.
• Having the right and exercising it are different things. Pakistani women gained the vote in 1947, yet cast only 10 percent of votes in 2013.

Steps Toward Racial Equality

In the United States, the 1965 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act banned discrimination in voting. African Americans also pushed for school desegregation.

Apartheid in South Africa

Apartheid, instituted in 1948, enforced racial segregation in South Africa. White South Africans were only 15 percent of the population but reserved good jobs and privileges for themselves. Pass laws forced black South Africans to carry identity documents when entering white areas, mixed marriages were banned, and classes for black students were taught only in Afrikaans. These rules marginalized the 85 percent of South Africans who were black, South Asian, or mixed race. As activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, "I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion. I want the full menu of rights."

How apartheid fell:

• In 1964, Nelson Mandela, a leader of the African National Congress (ANC), was imprisoned for life for agitating against apartheid. His imprisonment inspired a global anti-apartheid movement.
• South Africa became a pariah state. The UN expelled it in 1974, countries imposed economic sanctions, college students pressured universities and corporations to divest, and musicians held concerts demanding Mandela's release.
• Mandela began negotiating with the government from prison in 1986. F. W. de Klerk became acting president in 1989 and announced Mandela's release within six months.
• Reforms in the 1990s ended apartheid. In 1994, South Africa held its first free elections, rejoined the UN, and on May 10, 1994, Mandela was sworn in as the country's first black president.

The new Government of National Unity created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Unlike the Nuremberg Trials, which sought retribution, the TRC aimed to restore trust. It held 19 public hearings exposing apartheid-era human rights violations while granting amnesty to members of the apartheid regime who agreed to testify.

Caste Reservation in India

India's 1949 Constitution outlawed discrimination against the Dalits (also called untouchables); Pakistan did the same in 1953, though discrimination persisted well into the 21st century. India's caste reservation system guarantees that a percentage of government jobs, public sector jobs, and higher education spots go to people from historically underprivileged castes.

Human Rights Repression in China

China's economic liberalization in the late 1980s and 1990s was not matched by democratic reform. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in power since 1949, censored the news, controlled school curricula, required all nonstate organizations to register with the government, and tightly regulated international NGOs.

Tiananmen Square

In spring 1989, pro-democracy activists organized a public mourning event for a sympathetic high official and demanded to speak with leaders about freedom of the press and other reforms. When the government refused, citizens in more than 400 Chinese cities staged sit-ins, class boycotts, and hunger strikes. Hundreds of thousands of students, professors, and workers protested in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. After seven weeks, the government declared martial law and sent in troops with tanks. On June 4, 1989, the army attacked the unarmed protesters. The Chinese government claims nobody died; estimates from Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and the New York Times put civilian deaths anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand. The government still blocks websites about the event and imprisons those who commemorate June 4.

Minority Rights

China has 55 ethnic minorities, and the government has clashed with several: Tibetans calling for autonomy or independence, Uighurs protesting religious and political discrimination in Xinjiang, and Mongolians in Inner Mongolia who protested in 2011 against Han Chinese migration and the environmental damage from strip-mining, dams, highways, and overgrazing.

Environmental Repair and Economic Fairness

People also framed clean water, clean air, and a sustainable planet as rights worth claiming. This thread connects directly to the environmental costs covered in AMSCO 9.3 on technology and the environment.

• Earth Day started in the US in 1970 (April 22) to focus attention on recycling, alternative energy, local food, and antipollution laws. About 174 countries now participate.
• Greenpeace, founded in 1971, grew into a multinational organization with offices in more than 55 countries, fighting deforestation, desertification, global warming, whaling, and overfishing. It's famous for direct action like confronting whaling boats at sea.
• The Green Belt Movement, founded in 1977 by Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai, responded to environmental degradation left by colonialism. Rural Kenyan women planted trees to improve soil and collect rainwater, and the movement helped women see their own capacity for public action. Maathai won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, the first African woman to do so.

On the economic side, the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO) formed in 1989 to counterbalance the commercial focus of the World Trade Organization. Members commit to 10 fair trade principles, including fair prices, no child or forced labor, gender equity, good working conditions, transparency, and respect for the environment. (For the WTO and the globalized economy itself, see AMSCO 9.4 on economics in the global age.)

Key Terms to Know

Practice and Next Steps

For the College Board framing of this same material, read the Topic 9.5 Calls for Reform and Responses study guide, then continue to AMSCO 9.6 on globalized culture. All chapter summaries for the textbook live on the AMSCO notes page.

To check yourself, try AP World guided practice questions on Unit 9, drill vocabulary with the key terms glossary, and get feedback on your writing with FRQ practice and instant scoring. Unit 9 reform movements make great continuity-and-change evidence for LEQs about social hierarchies.