Civil Rights Essay, Research Paper

The 1960 s were one of the most significant decades in the twentieth century. The sixties were filled with new music, clothes, and an overall change in the way people acted, but most importantly it was a decade filled with civil rights movements. On February 1, 1960, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College in Greensboro went to a Woolworth s lunch counter and sat down politely and asked for service. The waitress refused to serve them and the students remained sitting there until the store closed for the night. The very next day they returned, this time with some more black students and even a few white ones. They were all well dressed, doing their homework, while crowds began to form outside the store. A columnist for the segregation minded Richmond News Leader wrote, Here were the colored students in coats, white shirts, and ties and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill, and some of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and honored flag of the Southern States in the last war fought by gentlemen. Eheu! It gives one pause (Chalmers 21). As one can see, African-Americans didn t have it easy trying to gain their civil rights. Several Acts were passed in the 60 s, such as Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. This was also, unfortunately, the time that the assassinations of important leaders took place. The deaths of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all happened in the 60 s.

Slavery in the United States existed from the early senventeenth century until 1865. It was put to an end by the combination of the Emancipation Proclamation, 1863, and then the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution. Although blacks may have been freed from slavery, it didn t mean that they were treated the same as everyone else. In 1896, Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court defined separate but equal standards. Rarely was anything equal though. Segregation went on until the landmark case, Brown vs. Board of Education, declared that separate schools based on race was unconstitutional (Microsoft). This case became the cornerstone of sweeping changes (Chalmers 17) because the decade following the Brown decision witnessed a complex interplay of forces between black citizens striving to exercise their constitutional rights, the increasing resistance of southern whites, and the equivocal response of the federal government (Robinson 2).

From 1955 to 1965, boycotts, sit-ins, demonstrations, marches, and community organizing raised black people s spirits and expectations, and greatly hurt legal segregation. The weeks that followed the Greensboro sit-in more sit-ins occurred throughout the country. Thousands had taken place by the end of 1960 and many people had often gone to jail for it (Chalmers 21). The Kennedy Era, 1960 1963, saw many important events. In 1961, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were the first African-Americans admitted into Wayne State University (Adams 6). The March on Washington, August 28, 1963, was a huge gathering of two hundred thousand people who gathered at the nations capital to show their support for civil rights for blacks and hear Martin Luther King, Jr., speak. It was here that King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. It was the March on Washington that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964(Microsoft). The Kennedy Era came to an abrupt halt with the result of his assassination on November 22, 1963 (Chalmers 25).

With the death of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson took over the presidency and then was reelected in the next election of 1964(Chalmers 25). Johnson won the 64 election by a landslide. His plan was to extend black suffrage and pass the Civil Rights Act in memory of Kennedy (Chalmers 43). It was during the Johnson Era that blacks gained most of their civil rights. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation in public places, proscribed discrimination in employment, and established enforcement machinery for school integration. The only thing that this legislation failed to address was voting rights (Robinson 4). The twenty-fourth amendment was put into law January 23, 1964 and struck down the poll tax. In recent years, a poll tax was to be paid in order for citizens to vote in the South. This kept most African-Americans from voting because they didn t have enough money to pay the tax. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed which gave every citizen the right to vote regardless of intelligence, race, or any other reason. Also, in 1965, the Economic Opportunity Act was passed. This act aimed at calming riots and providing job training and employment for the poor and colored people (Bogal-Allbritten 12-13). By 1966, the mood and phase had changed. Street marchers were no longer effective and the civil rights movement was breaking up (Chalmers 44).

One of the most horrid days in the 60 s would have to go down in the books as March 7, 1965. It was a Sunday and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital, Montgomery (Microsoft). Also, there to help organize the voting rights march, was Martin Luther King, Jr. (Robinson 5). This was a distance of about fifty miles. Over five hundred marchers were stopped just outside of Selma by state troopers and were told to go home. The marchers refused and as a result the police then attacked. They beat and tear-gassed the protestors. Seventy people went to the hospital that day. Luckily there were television cameras on the scene to record the bloody incident and show the United States viewers what was really going on. The scenes shocked everyone and Lyndon Johnson was prompted to deplore the violence. This day would be called Bloody Sunday. SCLC petitioned a federal district judge for an order that would allow them to march again without any interference from the police. Two weeks after Bloody Sunday, the march was redone with over three thousand people protesting. This march created the support needed to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law (Microsoft). Although the march to Montgomery was successful, the trip back was not for one white housewife who was driving marchers back. On the way back to Selma, some Ku Klux Klansmen overtook her and she was shot. State juries found the Klansmen innocent on the murder charge, but were eventually convicted in federal court for violating her civil rights (Chalmers 29).

Martin Luther King, Jr., was an important figure that worked hard throughout the 60 s in order to gain black Americans civil rights. In 1959, King went to India where he studied Ghandi s techniques of nonviolence. Sit-in movements began in Greensboro and soon followed many others throughout the country. King was arrested in October of 1960 at a major Atlanta department store. The charges on all the other protestors were dropped. King was kept in jail on a charge of violating probation for a previous traffic arrest case. He was kept in jail for four months of hard labor. The next year, December 15, 1961, King was arrested while fighting to desegregate public facilities in Albany, Georgia. He was charged with obstructing the sidewalk and parading without a permit. King s home was bombed on May 11, 1963, and then there was an explosion at his headquarters in the Gaston Motel. In response to the bombings, blacks began to riot in Birmingham. King s I Have a Dream speech at the largest and most dramatic civil rights demonstration, the March on Washington, was the high point of the event. In 1964, King was named Man of the Year in Time magazine. King was then awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later on that year, December 10. King then set up a voter registration drive in Selma in February 1965. King s civil rights movements came to an abrupt halt when he was assassinated April 4, 1968, in the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. The president then declared April 7 a national day of mourning for King (Biography 1-7).

The 1960 s also had many other people that were important to the development of the civil rights movement. Malcolm X was a man who had a lot of influence over blacks. Although he spent most of his time outside of the United States traveling to such places as Africa and the Middle East, he did help out in the civil rights movement. Malcolm established a secular Black Nationalist party called the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Malcolm was assassinated February 21, 1965, while addressing an OAAU rally in New York City. Malcolm s assassins were allegedly associated with the black Muslims (Microsoft).

Stokely Carmichael attended Howard University in 1960 and became active in the civil rights movement. He participated in sit-ins along with many other students and joined the Non-violent Action Group in Washington. He was arrested in 1961 when participating in the Freedom Rides, a campaign against segregation in interstate transportation, by trying to integrate a bus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi. He ended up spending most of his summer vacation in jail that summer. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in philosophy. In 1966, he was elected as a chairperson of SNCC. Carmichael then started to give speeches and was looked upon as a successor of Malcolm X. In 1969, he moved to Africa where he changed his name to Kwame Tur , a named derived from two African leaders, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and S kou Tour of Guinea. He established a permanent home in Guinea that year and only returned on occasions to the United States to give lectures (Microsoft).

Bobby Seale was the founder and leader of the Black Panther Party. The BPP was founded on reaction to the racism he and his friend, Huey Newton, had experienced. The goals of their party were: to end police brutality, full employment, improve housing and education, and the exemption of blacks from military service. Seale organized many community-based activities. In 1967, he led a group of armed Black Panthers to Sacramento, California, to protest a gun-control bill being considered by the California state legislature. He and thirty others were arrested, but the media coverage of the event attracted attention and the organization grew. Seale was again arrested in 1968 along with seven others for indicting a riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Seale eventually left the Black Panther Party in 1974 (Microsoft).

On February 13, 1960, a man by the name of Rev. James Lawson, inspired by the Greensboro sit-in movement, convened the first sit-in movement mass meeting. He then set up a plan in which five hundred students, from Baptist Seminary, Fisk University, Meharry Medical, and Tennessee State, would be sent to downtown Nashville sit-in sites. Lawson was much like Martin Luther King, Jr.; he wet to India as a missionary and studied the philosophy of nonviolence with disciples of Ghandi (Adams 49).

The sixties youth generation was, for the first time, a powerful force in the civil rights movement. During this time there was a lot of young people attending college. The number of college students had increased dramatically during this time. In 1946, there were 1.7 million college students. By 1960, this number had increased to 3.8 million and over the next five years increased to 6.5 million. In 1970, there were over eight million college students. Campuses revolted throughout the sixties against the Vietnam War and protested for civil rights, but then calmed down by the early seventies (Chalmers 68-69). It wasn t just the college campuses that revolted and rioted though. Riots were breaking out across the nation during the sixties. There was a riot in the summer of 1964 called the Red Summer riot and the following year the Long, Hot Summer riot went on. Urban riots in 1965-1967 challenged the notion that the civil rights movement had purged racial injustice from America (Robinson 1).

Richard Flacks summed up the sixties as romanticism (the search for self-expression and a free life), antiauthoritarianism (opposition to arbitrary, centralized rule-making), egalitarianism (belief in popular participation and rejection of elitism), antidogmatism (rejection of ideology), moral purity (antipathy toward self-interested behavior and the sell out of the older generation), community (breakdown of interpersonal barriers, a desire for relationships), and antiinstitutionalism (distrust of conventional institutional roles and careers). Flacks was a previous leader of SDS (Chalmers 74). The sixties were filled with civil rights movements and great leaders guided people through this time. Before the sixties blacks may have been free persons in the United States, but they weren t looked upon as the same as everyone else. Blacks had almost no rights and couldn t vote. The sixties granted them their well-deserved rights.