Civil Rights
Trace the development of the Civil Rights Movement from the Brown v. Board decision into and including the Black Power Movement. Use the links provided and more if needed. Make sure to present a thesis at the beginning of your essay:
http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1955%E2%80%931968)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Power
Address the following questions in your essay:
· What various strategies were adopted by civil rights leaders?
· How did civil rights activists bring the movement to national attention, and how did the movement evolve?
· Why was the federal government reluctant to fully support the movement?
· What role did the federal government eventually play in the movement?
· What successes were achieved?
· Why did the movement eventually lose momentum?
Essay should be minimum of 700 words. Use MLA style for use of sources and internal citations.
ANSWER
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement focused on the fight for social integrity that occurred mainly between 1950 and 1960 for the Black Americans to have the same rights under the law in the U.S (Yufeng and Rui, 2021). Some of the leaders who led the civil rights movement included Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and Little Rock Nine. For more than 400 years of American Years, white supremacy, racism, slavery, and discrimination were vital to the U.S’s economic, social, and political growth. The civil rights leaders relied on a three-angled strategy that included civil disobedience, boycotts, economic withdrawal, and grassroots organizing.
Civil disobedience, also considered passive resistance is the rejection to obey directives or demands of the government without active measures of opposition or resorting to violence. Civil disobedience is used to force concessions from the ruling government. The acts of civil disobedience manifested in several ways, such as marches, freedom rides, hunger strikes, or sit-downs (Reed, 2019). For instance, when the authorities in the south actively resisted the court orders to reconcile, the civil rights leaders turned into non-violent disobedience.
The civil rights leaders also used direct actions such as boycotts. The boycotts were aimed at leading social amendments during the civil rights movement. Montgomery Bus Boycott is one of the well-known, led by Martin Luther King Jr., who planned the citywide boycott, which was against the racial seclusion on the public transport. The success of one day boycott led the civil rights leaders to continue organizing the long-term boycott.
Grassroots organizing relied on collective action from the local level to influence change at the national, regional, and local levels. Different local and national grassroots movements aimed to end seclusion in the south during the civil rights movement. The grassroots protests mobilized and demanded that the government end segregation in public facilities and guarantee the black Americans their voting rights.
Civil rights activists are well-known for fighting social inequality and leading a long-term influence on the lives of black Americans. The civil rights activists aimed at safeguarding social, political, and economic civil rights for black Americans. The Civil rights activists were involved in tactics such as petitioning the federal government, bringing lawsuits and mass direct action that led to national attention (Newman, 2022). The civil rights activists organized movements and protests that led to interruptions, thus gaining national attention. The civil rights activists encountered fierce resistance from the government to the campaign, which led to national attention, especially on March 7th, 1965, when the civil rights workers were attacked by the white law enforcer’s officers while marching from Selma to Montgomery.
The civil rights movement began in the mid-1950s and began evolving, with a major catalyst being the NAACP activist Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus (Blansett, 2018). The civil rights movement gained drive after the United State Supreme Court decaled seclusion unlawful in public schools regarding the Case of Brown V. Board of Education. Martin Luther King Jr. was then chosen as the boycott supporter and non-violent resistance leader. They then formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which provided an institutional framework that supported the local protest movements. Freedom rides began in 1961, signaling a new beginning of the protest activity, which grew in intensity and scale. Protests grew in dozens in other cities, with media attention concentrated on the civil rights movement. The civil rights fight went into the 20th century with an enduring transformation of the legal status of African Americans.
The government was reluctant to fully support the civil rights movement since they shared racist ideologies, which led them to shut down public parks and schools to prevent the integration of black Americans. They also supported violence against civil rights activists to prevent progressive actions to eliminate segregation. Most of the leaders in the federal government were segregationist leaders who were not ashamed of their racial ideologies (Hollingsworth, 2020). They were not challenged by modern institutions, which made the federal government reluctant to support the movement. Additionally, most of the elected officials in the federal government won through support from the mass opposition to civil rights. For instance, John. F. Kennedy was reluctant to support the civil rights movement due to fear of losing support from most southern democrats.
The federal government enforced civil rights, which were intended to end discrimination based on color, race, national origin, and religion in the U.S. The government intervened to change the segregation laws in southern states, end legal segregation in housing, education, and employment as well as reestablish voting for black Americans. The federal government intervened to enforce the decisions of the Supreme Court regarding segregation. The government introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protected and restored the rights of the minorities by authorizing the government oversight of the registration and elections.
The civil rights movement ended the Jim Crow segregation, passed the federal legislation outlawing cultural discrimination, and created awareness of the African American culture. Through their efforts, the civil rights movement improved the black economic opportunity, desegregation, and voting rights for African Americans. The civil rights movement lost momentum since everything that could be done by the federal government was already done, getting the voting rights and ending discrimination and segregation. The killing of Dr. Martin Luther King also influenced the drive of the civil rights movement since it ended his efforts as their leader to expand the movement from civil rights to human rights.
References
Blansett, K. (2018). Journey to Freedom. In Journey to Freedom. Yale University Press.
Hollingsworth, K. (2020). Legitimizing black businesses: three examples from the Civil War to civil rights. Journal of Management History.
Newman, M. (2022). The civil rights movement. In The Civil Rights Movement. Edinburgh University Press.
Reed, T. V. (2019). The art of protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the present. U of Minnesota Press.
Yufeng, H., & Rui, Z. (2021, December). The Black Civil Rights Movement in America from the 1950s to 1960s. In 2021 4th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2021) (pp. 1058-1065). Atlantis Press.
