The Beat Generation and Civil Rights in the USA

In a nutshell

In this summary, you will find all the important information to understand the Beat Generation, an important cultural and literary movement deeply linked to the development of Civil Rights in the USA.

​​Civil Rights in the USA

Even years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Afro-American communities still suffered from discrimination, segregation, and oppression. Between 1876 and 1965, the Jim Crow laws were enacted and Afro-Americans were banned from classrooms, bathrooms, theatres, train cars, juries, and legislatures. From the 1950s, Civil Rights activists started non-violent movements and protests to bring change, some of the most representative leaders were Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Andrew Goodman. As a consequence, the federal government passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later the Civil Rights Act of 1968. After the 1960s, the protest activity decreased and anti-black violence declined, however, it left a permanent mark on America's society and history.

The Author's Life

Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was born in Massachusetts in the heart of a French-Canadian family. After the war, Kerouac traveled across the States and became friends with the poet Allen Ginsberg, the novelist William S. Burroughs, and the writer Neal Cassady; this circle became the center of the Beat movement because through their works they paved the way for the cultural revolution.

THE BEAT GENERATION

'Beat' was a slang term used by jazz musicians to mean 'down and out', or, poor and exhausted. On the other hand, Kerouac claimed that the word meant exhausted, rejected by society, at the bottom of the world, and beatitude or beatific. The main features of the Beat Generation were:

THE BEATNIKS

As a result of the popularity of the Beat literature, a countercultural type came up: the beatnik. The term Beatnik was created by a journalist in 1958, the '-nik' suffix was taken from 'Sputnik', a satellite launched by the Soviet Union, triggering fear in many Communist-fearing Americans.

The beatniks lived in dirty apartments, hitchhiked across the country along Route 66, sold drugs, and committed crimes for money. Also, they acted on impulse and pushed their senses to the limit by using drugs and alcohol. They created the underground culture which included jazz, poetry, and the Eastern philosophy of Zen Buddhism. The City Lights bookstore in San Francisco founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti was their reference play since the Beat poets and novelists presented their works there, as time passed, the movement transformed into the hippie movement of the Sixties.

On the Road

'On the Road' is a novel written by Jack Kerouac in 1957. It is a diary-like story of Kerouac's trips across North America with his friend, Neal Cassady. The novel does not have a central plot, however, some structural elements provide cohesion.

CHARACTERS AND STYLE

Dean Moriarty is the hero of the book, he symbolizes the feeling of living every moment with extreme intensity to overcome the fear and sense of void of the post-war generation. Kerouac's writing style is characterized by the exposure of feelings as an escape from emotion. The novel contains an unsophisticated language defined as 'hip talk', a sort of street language based on spontaneity and monosyllabic words.

The following text is an extract from On the Road, Part I:

In this passage, Sal spends almost all his money on a bus ticket to Chicago. He describes in detail his trip back to the city. This extract portrays the use of 'hip talk', for example, Penn instead of Pennsylvania, or Chi instead of Chicago.