Civil Rights Movement Essay

The polished justlys movement in the United States was a political, effective, and loving struggle that was organized primarily by somber the Statesns with many facilitate from uncloudedn America. The polished rights struggle was aimed at gaining full citizenship and racial comparability for all in all Americans, particularly the to the highest degree discriminated group, African Americans, and was first and foremost a challenge to separatism. Segregation was deeply embedded in the to the sulfur and was utilize to chasteness blacks since the reconstruction of the due south following the American Civil struggle. During the civil rights movement, individuals and organizations challenged separatism and discrimination by exploitation a number of methods that include refuses, marches, boycotts, and refusing segregation laws. Most historians agree that the civil rights movement began with either the brownish v. mesa of didactics in 1954 or the capital of aluminium slew boycott in 1955 and ended with the balloting Rights Act of 1965 however, there is a curing of debate on when it began and ended. on that point were civil rights issues well into the 1980s.The main gibe of discrimination against blacks in the United States was segregation, often called the Jim Crow system. Segregation became parking area in the South after the Reconstruction when the Democratic Party had gained control of the South and started to reverse black advances made during reconstruction. Jim Crow laws emerged and effectively segregate every aspect of life for blacks in the South. This segregation included, but was non limited to, separate checks, ecstasy, restaurants, and parks, galore(postnominal) of which were inferior to white establishments. In theory, the black and white establishments were to be equal.The denial of voting rights, known as disfranchisement, is how the South controlled segregation. Between 1890 and 1910 virtually all the grey states p assed laws imposing requirements for voting that unplowed the black voter out. Some of these requirements included, the ability to read and write, property ownership, and paying poll taxes all these tactics were in direct violation of the fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. contrabands were virtually powerless, be accept they could non vote there was no intimacy they could do to foreclose the segregation of the South. Conditions in the northwestern were slightly better, blacks could vote but there were so few blacks in the North before World War II that their votes barely counted, furtherto a greater extent, even though segregated facilities in the North did not exist legally, most blacks were denied access to the more affluent facilities.There were civil rights movements prior to the 1960s. The National Afro-American League was formed in 1890 followed by the Niagara Movement in 1905, and then the National Association for the advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was foun ded in 1909, the NAACP was to keep back a great furbish up on the civil rights movement of the 1960s and still continues to exist today. The NAACP became 1 of the most important organizations that championed civil rights in the twentieth century and relied on a legal strategy that challenged segregation and discrimination against blacks by using the American legal system. There were galore(postnominal) cases that the NAACP fought in court that dance orchestra the precedence for the legal battles during the civil rights movement that would take place twenty to thirty years later. Although the legal battles fought by the NAACP in the twenties and thirties did little to change discrimination against blacks they did lay the foundation for a legal and tender challenge to the system the South had built.after two human race wars and a nation big depression the civil rights movement that most Americans are familiar with began to emerge. The great depression which devastated the Unit ed States in the late 1920s caused a migration of black Americans from the South to other parts of the country, this migration exposed many of them to different views on segregation and discrimination, many of these blacks from the South became the civil rights activist of the 1960s.World War II also caused migrations of large number of blacks inside the United States as many blacks found themselves moving up the social ladder as they took over war essential factory jobs. On the other hand, the return of black soldiers that had a new outlook on social and racial equality in the United States most probable was one of the biggest factors that caused the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Not just black Americans were affected by these events there were many white Americans, even in the South that matte up a change was needed. One such white southerner, Harold Fleming wroteIt wasnt that I came to love Negroes it was that I came to despise the system that did this. I mean, the nea rest thing you could be in the army to being black was to be a company officer with black troops, because you lived and operated under the same circumstances they did, and they got crapped all over . . . You were sort of a second-class officer or a second-class white because of your assignment.Fleming was a conventional white southerner born in Atlanta, Georgia, after he became involved in civil rights issues and according to Fleming, many of his white southern contemporaries would say, You ought to know better, being a native Georgia white. With all these factors in place, the civil rights movement in America emerged around the mid 1950s.On 17 May 1954, after consultation arguments on five cases that challenged elementary and secondary school segregation, the United States irresponsible Court issued a landmark rule in Brown v. Board of Education that stated racially segregated education was unconstitutional. Although this was an historic ruling that essentially voided the Pless y v. Ferguson ruling of 1896 that established the separate but equal ism which was so prevalent in the South. The fundamental problem with the Brown v. Education was that the U.S. Supreme Court did not have a plan to carry out this ruling. The ruling stated that the school cases were class follow ups and that left the states with the enforcement of this ruling, the court wrote, because of the wide applicability of this decision, and because of the great variety of local conditions, the formulation of decrees in these cases presents problems of grand complexity.At first white Southerners received this ruling with shock, however, by 1955 white opposition had grown into a clutchive resistance with organizations like the whiteness Citizens Council this council called for the economic coercion of blacks and whites who favored integrated schools. Schools in the South remained desegregated this integrating became a depicted object issue when the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus op enly defied a national court order to admit nine black disciples to a unretentive Rock high school on 2 September 1957. The media dramatized the serious-mindedness of integration by showing the nation pictures of an American high school being patrolled by federal troops so that black students could be protected from angry white mobs.The civil rights movement quickly locomote beyond school desegregation to challenge other unjust institutions in the South. It was Rosa Parks, a member of the capital of Alabama, Alabama NAACP, who refused to give up her ride to a white person on 1 December 1955 the capital of Alabama bus boycott that brought the city of Montgomery, Alabama to its knees had begun. Parks was arrested and the black company attr executions rallied local blacks to protest segregated buses this local protest evolved into a national boycott that involved support of over 50,000 blacks and lasted over a year and showed the American public the determination of the blacks to end segregation.During the Montgomery bus boycott the most influential civil rights leader emerged Martin Luther world power, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) became, undeniably, the most important figure passim the civil rights movement. It was King who seemed to have a master plan for the boycott, he emphasized keeping the struggle within the law and advocated nonviolence to attain the goals of the civil rights movement. During the Montgomery bus boycott, King statedWe are not asking for an end to segregation, thats a matter for the legislature and the courts. We find oneself that we have a plan within the law. All we are seek is umpire and fair treatment . . . We dont like the mentation of Negroes having to stand when there are vacant seats. We are demanding justice on that point.Kings and other black leaders along with the protestors of the Montgomery bus boycott hard work lastly paid off, in November 1956, a federal court ordered that Montgom erys buses desegregate. The Montgomery bus boycott was one of the milestones of the civil rights movement because it established a national civil rights movement that accept King as the leader and showed that nonviolent protest would work.Four black college students from North Carolina A & T University sat at a white only lunch restoration on 1 February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina to protest racial segregation within weeks, these student sit-ins had spread across the South to many cities as a form of protest. In April 1960, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating commissioning (SNCC) was founded to help organize and direct the student sit-in movement SNCC would eventually move into other areas of the civil rights movement. Because SNCC cogitate on making changes at the local level rather than the national level, many of the accomplishments of this organization did not become nationally known.The sit-ins did make the national news media and it was the New York multiplication t hat brought it to a national level. The New York Times published an article that interviewed the chisel in superintendent and the students, the article also told of how white teenagers and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members tried to bar the federal agency on the fifth day of the Greensboro sit-in. It was the well spoken black student Ezall Blair who told the newspaper on the second day that the students had been complacent and fearful the previous day and that they decided that morning that is was time for black students to wake up and change the situation.By November 1960, one hundred and fifty-five communities across the South had goggle box crews that were filming the demonstrations and the injustice that the students faced, white America, through the use of the mass media was seeing the same scenes over and over and for the first time witnessed segregation in the South the scenes shown were of students patiently waiting to get served, angry white hecklers, and carloads of students be ing taken to jail by guard. White students joined in, and in the North, many students boycotted the larger stores in the North that had lunch counters in the South, such as Woolworths. The culmination of the sit-ins occurred in Nashville, Tennessee, when, surprisingly, an unlikely ally emerged for the sit-ins. The mayor of Nashville, Ben West, proclaimed that lunch counters in Nashville would not be segregated. When asked why he made that decision, West replied, I could not agree that it was clean-livingly right for almostone to sell them merchandise and refuse them service. . . It was a moral question that a man has to answer, and not a politician. The sit-ins clearly exhibit to America that two-year-old blacks and whites were determined to reject segregation openly and together.After the sit-ins many of the SNCC members began to participate in freedom rides that started in the summer of 1961, these license Riders, both black and white, traveled the south in buses to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that stated segregation was illegal in bus stations that were open to interstate travel. These freedom rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and started in Washington, D.C., as the buses moved south more violence was directed towards them.This violence peaked when in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, buses were burn and the riders beaten. As a result of the freedom rides, the lawyer Generals Office realized that the Supreme Court decision in the Boynton v. Virginia was not enough to end discrimination on the interstates and bus stations. In November 1963, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the administration of president John Kennedy intervened and regulations were issued. By 1963, the Attorney General was able to say, Systematic segregation of Negroes in interstate transportation has disappeared.While the freedom rides and sit-ins were happening, SCLC leaders, under the guidance of King, were planning a serial publication of protest campaigns that would happen throughout Southern cities, these campaigns were to be highly air and were to break the barriers of age, social status, and race. The demonstrations were to be against racial injustice and required the mobilisation of thousands of peaceful demonstrators, both black and white, who were willing to participate in protest marches as long as necessary and who were also willing to be arrested and go to jail to achieve their goals. The first direct action protest took place in the spring of 1961 at Albany, Georgia. The presence of King and other SCLC leaders escalated the Albany protests by bringing national circumspection to Albany, however, after months of protests the police continued to jail protestors without a show of police violence and the protests ended in failure. The protests continued across the South with on the face of it little success.In the spring of 1963, SCLCs direct action protests eventually saw success sadly, this success was at the expense of many protesters of whom some were elementary age school children. After mass demonstrations had been conducted for several days in Birmingham, Alabama, SCLC begin to send children in to the protests, some of them as young as six. The Birmingham police chief, Eugene Connor, jailed thousands of them and provoked the outrage of parents and caused the media to give exclusive attention to the Birmingham protest, this is what King needed to be successful. The next day more children marched and Connor reacted with violence photographs of high pressure fire hoses and police dog attacks handoutd on peaceful demonstrators appeared on national and international media, producing an international outcry.Eventually some protestors began to fight back and the state police were called in, King called for a xxiv hour truce. The next day, On 9 May 1963, King promulgate an agreement with some white business leaders of Birmingham they agreed to the desegregation of some public facilities within ninety days, progress in hiring and promotion, the release of arrested protestors, and a biracial committee. Birmingham mayor, Art Hanes called the white negotiators a bunch of quisling, thornless traitors, King stated that the settlement was the most significant victory for justice weve ever seen in the Deep South.The civil rights movement direct action marches, for the most part, ended with the march on Washington D.C. In imposing 1963, over 200,000 civil rights supporters conducted a peaceful march in Washington, D.C. it was at this demonstration that King gave his famous I Have a daydream Speech. Because of this march, president Kennedy proposed a new civil rights law after Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress as a premium to Kennedy.The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), SNCC, SCLC, CORE, and NAACP all joined forces in 1964 to work towards establishing voters rights for black s, particularly in the South. Voting rights issues have always been an objective of the civil rights movement, in fact, after the sit-ins and freedom rides, SNCC focused most of their attention on establishing voters rights and educating blacks on how to vote. It was most likely the combination of a series of deaths of civil rights workers in the South, and the MFDPs arrival at the Democratic National Convention of 1964 that caused all the different civil rights organizations to work together towards voting rights It may also have been that barely voters rights was the last major obstacle to overcome.It was on 22 August 1964, during the Democratic National Convention, that MFDP member Fannie Lou Hamer, who was from a Mississippi sharecrop farmer family, addressed the nation on national television. Hamers sincere and chatter speech made supporters for black voting rights all over the nation. President Johnson, who did not support the MFDP, tried to detract attention from Hamer by conducted a last minute press conference on national television as Hamer was giving her testimony his ploy did not work. President Johnson recognized the support Hamer was getting and was willing to compromise and recognized the predominately black MFDP.It was the Selma, Alabama march on 7 March 1965 that was the final event to cause the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to happen. SCLC employed direct action techniques in a voting rights protest initiated by SNCC in Selma, when these protest were unsuccessful the protesters began a march to Montgomery, Alabama. As the marchers were leaving Selma, mounted police used gazump gas and batons to beat down marchers and others who were not part of the march, this became known as Bloody Sunday. Because the march was televised, the violence blow out of the water many Americans and caused a much-needed national support for a law to protect the Southern blacks right to vote. On 15 March 1965, President Johnson announced that he would send a voting rights bill to Congress. In a televised address to a mutual session, Johnson spoke on racial injustices and stated, Their cause essential be our cause, too. Because its not just Negroes, but really its all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice, then he shocked the nation by saying, And we shall overcome. Two days later a voting rights bill went to Congress. On 6 August 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the civil rights movement, according to most historians, ended.BibliographyAlbert, Peter J. and Hoffman, Ronald, eds., We Shall Overcome Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Freedom Struggle. New York Pantheon Books, 1990.