Civil Rights
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement is a relevant part of American history, most especially for the African American population. The movement was established because African Americans were deprived of their human rights and treated as inferior compared to their Caucasian counterparts. The black community struggled to have their voices heard, and the movement provided the means for such endeavor. The civil rights movement endured for almost a decade, and it has successfully given the African Americans the status they had during the Reconstruction through legislation.
The beginning of the civil rights movement can be traced as early as August 1955[i]. The event that started the movement was the murder of Emmett Till. The fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago was said to have whistled at Caucasian woman. As a result, he was kidnapped, tortured and shot. His body was found in the Tallahatchie River. J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, two Caucasian men, were guilty of committing the crime but were acquitted. On December that same year, an African American woman named Rosa Parks challenged the tradition of segregation when she declined to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Her arrest resulted in the Montgomery bus boycott by the African American community, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.[ii].
The year 1957 was also marked with activity by the civil rights movement. Earlier that year, Martin Luther King, along with two others, created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [iii]. The SCLC contributed greatly to the movement, as it promoted and upheld civil disobedience and nonviolence. In September of that year, integration of blacks and whites were attempted in a high school but it resulted in conflict. Governor Orval Faubus refused to let the nine black students enter, forcing President Dwight Eisenhower to meddle and send troops over to settle the problem [iv].
The civil rights movement continued to be active in the 1960s. In...
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