Civil Rights Movement Research Paper

The civil rights movement has been fought on American soil since the first slaves were brought over in chains to the new world. Even when the United States declared, “that all men are created equal”, this concept was not extended to slaves or former slaves after the Civil War. The modern movement got its taking off point from the historic 1954 Supreme Court case Brown V. Board of Education. From the courts, to persistent protests, President Kennedy and Johnson were pushed to advocate for the passage of important pieces of federal legislation guaranteeing equal rights under the law.
Even though President Abraham Lincoln had emancipated slaves during the Civil War and amendments to the Constitution in the 1860s guaranteed freed slaves civil

With Johnson in the White House, southern opposition was overcome and the law was passed in July 2, 1964. “It expanded the authority of the federal government to challenge school segregation as well as discrimination in public accommodations and employment “ (Lawson and Payne 29). The Civil Rights Act was the beginning of what many of the people in America were fighting for, equal rights, and protection, secured by the government. Following the Civil Rights Act, a Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, thanks in part to the Freedom Summer, made it illegal to deny black people the right to vote by ways of literacy tests, poll taxes, and any other ways southern states could come up with. The Council of Federated Organization (COFO), SNCC, CORE, and NAACP organized the Freedom Summer. This event brought 600-700 northern white student volunteers to help black voters register in Mississippi, where there was the lowest percent of black registered voters. In the first days of the Freedom Summer three civil rights workers were killed, one black and two white. President Johnson directed the FBI to investigate and “as a result, the bureau cracked the case and succeeded in infiltrating and severely damaging the Ku Klux Klan, which was behind the killings” (Lawson and Payne 31). The civil rights movement had been fighting a long battle in order to gain equal rights and finally they were seeing what was worth so much to them, equal rights laws protecting them.
Ella Baker and A. Philip Randolph gave us great insights into how black people in America were feeling during the