Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The US civil rights movement
American civil rights movement
The US civil rights movement
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: The US civil rights movement
"Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external"
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Today's world is based on appearance, and most often the goal is not as important as the means by which it is achieved. Why is this such a 'problem?' Time after time, people come to find that they have wasted their lives working towards a goal which, in the end, was never worth all that work to begin with, or they realize that they could have gone about their actions differently. The people of modern America are all about living live for the moment, taking risks, not making sacrifices, and never yielding to 'the long run'. Looking at the world of 2015, one can witness the apex of human civilization. Who can question the customs, morals, and nature of today's Americans, without arguing with results?
Consider the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1991). The integration of the two races would have gone a lot easier and faster if both sides discarded their internal principles and beliefs and did their best to make the other side happy, thus creating an equal society.
Until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, certain literacy tests
restricted black voting. This was a decent attempt to meet black demands, but the act
only opened voting rights to uneducated people (black and white) and put more control in
their hands, which was a mistake. That now leaves the question, ?why were there so
many more illiterate blacks than whites?...
the laws and male African Americans at a certain age, were now given the ballot.
...ver, the minority groups started fighting for their rights so as to enjoy their privileges as stipulated by the constitution. The minority groups comprised of African Americans and Hispanics. This led to the formation of a number of civil rights for the African Americans were continually being infringed by the whites. As the USA was fighting against racial discrimination, it was still criticizing communism by the Soviet Union. The president recommended that the senate pass bills that would regard and promote equal rights and privileges for all the American citizens. Despite the failure of the recommendation, Truman, the president then used the executive powers bound to him in the desegregation of the armed forces. This led to the passing of the civil rights act and the voting act in the 1964 and 1965. This allowed for the African Americans to have the right to vote.
...dom and right to vote established by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, blacks were still oppressed by strong black codes and Jim Crow laws. The federal government created strong legislation for blacks to be helped and educated, but it was ineffective due to strong opposition. Although blacks cried out to agencies, such as the Freemen's Bureau, declaring that they were "in a more unpleasant condition than our former" (Document E), their cries were often overshadowed by violence.
Although many laws were passed that recognized African Americans as equals, the liberties they had been promised were not being upheld. Hoffman, Blum, and Gjerde state that “Union League members in a North Carolina county, upon learning of three or four black men who ‘didn’t mean to vote,’ threatened to ‘whip them’ and ‘made them go.’ In another country, ‘some few colored men who declined voting’ were, in the words of a white conservative, ‘bitterly persecute[ed]” (22). Black codes were also made to control African Americans. Norton et al. states that “the new black codes compelled former slaves to carry passes, observe a curfew, live in housing provided by a landowner, and give up hope of entering many desirable occupations” (476). The discrimination and violence towards African Americans during this era and the laws passed that were not being enforced were very disgraceful. However, Reconstruction was a huge stepping stone for the way our nation is shaped today. It wasn’t pretty but it was the step our nation needed to take. We now live in a country where no matter the race, everyone is considered equal. Reconstruction was a success. Without it, who knows where our nation would be today. African American may have never gained the freedoms they have today without the
President Johnson tried to enforce Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan. That as soon as ten percent of the population of any southern state took an oath of loyalty to the union and adopted a constitution that abolished slavery they would be readmitted to the union. The radical republicans in congress totally disagreed with Johnson. Many of the southern states in 1865 under presidential reconstruction adopted what was known as black codes. These codes restricted blacks from any participation in the rights of citizenship. Blacks were confined to an inferior position, they were not legally slaves anymore, but they had no rights of citizenship.
Albeit, American society has come quite a ways in the acceptance of the individual regardless of gender, age, creed or ethnicity. prejudices of different sorts are still to be found throughout every one of the United States of America. The Civil Rights Movement fought to overcome the racial inequalities. inherent and ingrained in the minds of America's citizens and the world. government which they oversaw; it was one of the most important eras.
Despite the 14th and 15th constitutional amendments that guarantee citizenship and voting right regardless of race and religion, southern states, in practice, denied African Americans the right to vote by setting up literacy tests and charging a poll tax that was designed only to disqualify them as voters. In 1955, African Americans still had significantly less political power than their white counterparts. As a result, they were powerless to prevent the white from segregating all aspects of their lives and could not stop racial discrimination in public accommodations, education, and economic opportunities. Following the 1954 Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, it remained a hot issue in 1955. That year, however, it was the murder of the fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till that directed the nation’s attention to the racial discrimination in America.
During the early 1900s post reconstruction era, African Americans faced extreme injustice and prejudice in society. By being denied rights guaranteed in the Constitution, and being subject to outright racism, African Americans saw their democratic rights slowly being taken away from them. The Jim Crow laws were the facilitator of this democratic infringement through intimidation, as well as by the failings of our prized judicial system. By denying African Americans certain unalienable rights guaranteed to all American citizens, the Jim Crow laws were one of the greatest contractions of democracy in American history.
Toward the end of the Progressive Era American social inequality had stripped African Americans of their rights on a local and national level. In the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessey vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sided with a Louisiana state law declaring segregation constitutional as long as facilities remain separate but equal. Segregation increased as legal discriminatory laws became enacted by each state but segregated facilities for whites were far superior to those provided for blacks; especially prevalent in the South were discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow laws which surged after the ruling. Such laws allowed for segregation in places such as restaurants, hospitals, parks, recreational areas, bathrooms, schools, transportation, housing, hotels, etc. Measures were taken to disenfranchise African Americans by using intimidation, violence, putting poll taxes, and literacy tests. This nearly eliminated the black vote and its political interests as 90% of the nine million blacks in America lived in the South and 1/3 were illiterate as shown in Ray Stannard Baker’s Following the Color Line (Bailey 667). For example, in Louisiana 130,334 black voters registered in 1896 but that number drastically decreased to a mere 1,342 in 1904—a 99 percent decline (Newman ). Other laws prevented black...
The Civil Rights Movement had a lot going on between 1954 and 1964. While there were some successful aspects of the movement, there were some failures as well. The mixture of successes and failures led to the extension of the movement and eventually a more equal American society.
Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation in the United States was commonly practiced in many of the Southern and Border States. This segregation while supposed to be separate but equal, was hardly that. Blacks in the South were discriminated against repeatedly while laws did nothing to protect their individual rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ridded the nation of this legal segregation and cleared a path towards equality and integration. The passage of this Act, while forever altering the relationship between blacks and whites, remains as one of history’s greatest political battles.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbid businesses connected with interstate commerce to discriminate when choosing its employees. If these businesses did not conform to the act, they would lose funds that were granted to them from the government. Another act that was passed to secure the equality of blacks was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This act, which was readopted and modified in 1970, 1975, and 1982, contained a plan to eliminate devices for voting discrimination and gave the Department of Justice more power in enforcing equal rights. In another attempt for equal rights, the Equal Employment ...
Before any steps could be taken for the equality of human kind, we had the tackle the idea of intergrationism. This time is often referred to as the Nadir of American Race Relations, which simply put means that racism was at its worst during the time period of the Civil Rights Movement. Pulling together for equality proved to be a grueling task for Americans. In order to move into the future, one must let go of the past, and many people were not eager to abandon the beliefs that had been engrained in them since birth. Racial discrimination was present nationwide but the outrageous violence of African Americans in southern states became know as Jim Crow Laws.
Voting rights was one of the number one issues that black people had to face because those who were in charge of the voting poll made it hard for black folks. For example, they ...
It was now illegal to have the “separate but equal” facilities as in previous years. It enabled the schools to be intergraded giving everybody the opportunity to receive the education they needed or desired. Not long after this Act was passed, the Voting Rights of 1965 was signed into law. President Lyndon Johnson signed both acts into law. President John F. Kennedy first proposed the Civil Rights Act but was assassinated before it was signed into law. The act made it illegal to administer voting restrictions. Many Southern states had poll taxes which many African Americans could not afford, or literacy tests that the black men were not able to pass. If one was not able to pass the test or pay the poll tax they were omitted from being able to vote. This was unfair because the schools were segregated and the material needed to pass the test was more than likely taught in the “white” schools and was not covered in the “black” schools. This just proves the fact that “separate but equal” mat not always have been as true as perceived as in the court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which at first decided was constitutional.