Protest Movements of the 1960s

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“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King in his from letter from a Birmingham jail (King 269). The 1960’s would become a time of protests movements and injustice and inequality would be the common theme. For two groups in particular, African-Americans and Women, inequality had gone on for a very long time. The Civil Rights Movement, followed by the Women’s Liberation Movement would use similar tactics and reasoning to try and get what they wanted. The protests and movements during the 1960’s saw the United States policing the world during the Cold War to establish freedom and used this hypocrisy to try and establish their own freedom.
African Americans have been subject to discrimination ever sense they first came to the United States. In Martin Luther King’s letter he talks about how African Americans have been told to wait but explains that they are impatient and cannot wait anymore to earn equal rights (King, 270-271). Discrimination in all facets of life is what the Civil Rights Movement is protesting. A huge court case that has contributed a lot to this discrimination was Plessey v. Ferguson. It stated that whites and blacks could be separated if facilities are equal. This decision led to separate schools, bathrooms, and drinking fountains to name a few. The problem with this was that these facilities were no where being close to equal especially schools in which black children were far behind their white counterparts. The other thing African Americans were protesting was discrimination in general. Many times employers would refuse to hire blacks or if they did, they received the most menial types of jobs that were very low paying. This combined with white control of the h...

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...t started before the second wave of feminism, this could have contributed to more resistance and then when people see this movement succeeding, they are less resistive to Women’s Liberation because they assume it will succeed like the Civil Rights Movement did.
Discrimination by sex and race had been a major theme in the United States ever since its’ founding. People of different races and sex had been fighting for equal rights for a long time. However, the movements during the 1960s were able to take advantage of the United States hypocrisy of freedom. The United States looks bad when it is fighting for other countries’ freedom during the cold war, yet has nothing remotely close to freedom within its borders. These movements by forming organizations, non-violent protesting, and using the courts and the government were able achieve equal rights for their cause.

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