Civil Rights Movement
The Black Civil Rights movement in the 1950's and 60's was a political, legal and social struggle of the black Americans to gain full citizenship rights and to achieve racial equality. The black struggle for Civil Rights was very hard. No group in America has or has had more difficulty assimilating into the American Culture. Segregation was started by white American southerners to separate everything between the blacks and the whites. It was also knows as the "Jim Crow" system and became common to the southern. Everything possible was separated between the blacks and the whites; schools, toilet, transportation, restaurants were all separated, the blacks were poorly funded compared to the whites (Branch 72). The black people tried to fight discrimination against them whenever possible. The most significant one during the early 50's was the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama led by Martin Luther King. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was told to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person (Hampton 13). When she refuses, she was arrested which caused protest by the black community. Martin Luther King at that time was president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the protest. These activities included
Unfortunately, the thing that really moved the civil rights movement along significantly was the murder of rev. Racial problems clearly still existed in the United States after King's assassination in 1968. Leadership came from black political and religious organizations such as the Congress on Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Council Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and other forms of nonviolent protest became the weapons to fight segregation. Some blacks argue that the movement is not over yet because the goal of full equality has not been achieved. Over 200,000 men and women joined a freedom march all over America to Washington D. Blacks achieved the right to vote and the influence that went with that right in a democracy. President Kennedy proposed a new civil rights law after the big march. And Ralph bunche, then UN Under secretary for special political affairs. In 1965, King and other black leaders wanted to push beyond social integration, now guaranteed under the previous year's civil rights law, to political rights, mainly Southern blacks' rights to register and vote. In the march, whites, Negroes, clergymen and beatniks, old and young, walked side by side. Although full equality has not yet been reached, the civil rights movement did put fundamental reforms in place.
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