Civil Rights Movement Essays - Free Essays, Term Papers

Civil Rights Movement Essays - Free Essays, Term Papers Civil Rights Movement African Americans have overcome many struggles as well as obstacles in the early years which have still not been terminated. African Americans have fought for freedom from enslavement, the right to earn a living, have land and a job, have equal justice, good quality education, to escape from oppression, the right to self pride and an end to stereotyping. Blacks everywhere got fed up with being treated as if they were inferior and slaves, so they banded together to form a movement. Not just any kind of movement, but a movement that would see victories as well as violence and death. That movement was the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement had a major goal, and that goal was to end discrimination based on race, creed, color, and gender, and to put an end to segregation. Its' supporters aimed for equality of all people and for the integration of society. The previously mentioned goals were achieved by many different means. The movement had its share of leaders, events, and strategies that helped to reach its' goals. There was a fair share of success and failures that accompanied the Civil Rights Movement. I believe that there were a few amendments that helped blacks to gain some of their rights in the future. Some of those amendments were the 13th and 14th amendment. The 13th amendment abolished servitude everywhere in the U.S. and declared that congress shall have power to enforce this outcome by appropriate legislation. The 14th amendment conferred citizenship on the freedman and prohibited states from abridging their constitutional privileges and immunities. It also barred any state from taking a persons life, liberty, and property without due process of law and from denying equal protection of laws. When these amendments were passed I think it gave many blacks the courage to express themselves and stand up for what they believe in. The rise of the modern civil rights movement was when a group of first- year students from North Carolina and Agricultural and Technical College decided to seat themselves at a segregated lunch counter and refused to leave until the were served. They took the advice of nonviolence from a great leader named Martin Luther King Jr.(who will be talked about in later paragraphs). With these four men doing this each and every day they gained support of many other black students as well as some white students. These boys actions started sit-ins in hundreds of cities. In the result of this act many blacks were arrested, beaten, jailed, deprived of their jobs, intimidated, and some even killed. With all this happening the government was forced to protect many black Americans and to guarantee them their rights. In order to enforce these rights federal legislati ons were passed, public facilities such as transportation and waiting rooms were now desegregated and blacks finally gained back their access to the polling booth. There have been some white people who have been involved in the civil rights movement such as a man named John Brown. He led a slave revolt and was considered a fanatic by other whites and a martyr by the people whose cause he campaigned. 1 A lot of whites that did help blacks in their struggle for freedom were intimidated and abused by others, but that never made them give up. In the Supreme court cases Plessy vs- Ferguson and in the Brown case many of the decisions that were made combined to produce the Montgomery movement, which will be talked about in the following paragraph. Supreme Court decisions, as in the case of Brown vs. Topeka board of education of 1954, also helped in bringing the blacks one step closer to achieving their goals. The separate-but-equal doctrine was first established in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson that the separation of races is constitutional as long as equal accommodations are made for each race. The ruling in the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education overturned the Plessy ruling. It stated that separate educational facilities were unequal and unconstitutional. Schools all over the country then began to integrate their student body. The Supreme Court had ruled that deliberately created segregation would place a psychological inferiority on the black