The Civil Right Movement Essay Research Paper — страница 2

the practice of cross-town bussing and “Separate, but equal” caused psychological damage leading black people to feel they were inferior. He would also say that desegregation should “commence with all deliberate speed.” In response to this came the Seven Manifestos a document signed by 101 national senators and representatives. In it they claimed that the Supreme Court had exceeded its judicial authority, and encouraged school districts to overthrow the decision. As a result of this by 1966 less than 1% of Southern schools had actually desegregated. In show of his opposition, in 1957 Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order, and with the aid of national guardsmen, attempted to prevent the admittance of nine black students to Little Rock’s Central High

school. President Dwight Eisenhower sent 1,000 federal paratroopers to enforce the desegregation and protect the “Little Rock Nine” for the entire school year. The national media event dramatized the seriousness of the desegregation for many Americans. Similar events occurred on September 30, 1962 at the University of Mississippi and in 1963 at the University of Alabama under President Kennedy’s administration. The third tenet of the Civil Rights Movement was the Social Movement. It started on December 1st 1955 with a member of the Montgomery, Alabama branch of the NAACP, Rosa Parks. A seamstress returning home from a hard day’s work, was told to give up her seat to a white person on a city bus. When refused to move, she was arrested. The city’s black community was

angered by their mistreatment on city buses and overnight organized a bus boycott. The boycott was an immediate success with virtually unanimous support from the 50,000 blacks in Montgomery. The boycott lasted for more than a year ending in triumph when in November 1956 a federal court ordered the city’s buses desegregated. The discriminatory practices of Southern City buses were detailed in John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. He described the “hate stare” given to blacks, and the expected behaviors of blacks such as men not looking at whites, and addressing everyone with a title, regardless of their age. Montgomery’s new young Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr. was president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the bus boycott. In 1957 he

became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC wanted to compliment the NAACP legal strategy by encouraging the use of nonviolent, direct action demonstrations and boycotts. A form of these was passive sit-ins. On February 1, 1960, four black college students from North Carolina A&T University began protesting racial segregation in restaurants by sitting at “white only” lunch counters and waiting to be served. Within days sit-ins had spread throughout North Carolina, and within weeks were taking place in cities across the South. From the Sit-ins sprang the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded in April 1960 in Raleigh, North Carolina by Ella Baker. The organization later became intimately involved with voting registration of

southern blacks. One of the earlier organizations was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942 to challenge segregation in public accommodations in the North. It was a bi-racial organization composed of young liberals. The group coordinated with the SNCC to push for voter registration. The most visible example of the Social Movement was the March on Washington D.C. Led by A. Phillip Randolph, on August 28th 1963 over 200,000 men, women, and children gathered on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial to show their support of the Civil Rights Movement and pressure the Kennedy administration and Congress to pass civil rights legislation. It was there that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I have a Dream” speech. It was an inspirational speech that

defined what America should be. As a result of the March, President Kennedy proposed a new civil rights law. Following his assassination , Lyndon Johnson saw to the bill’s passage. The bill prohibited segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in education and employment. It also gave the executive branch the power to enforce the act’s provisions. Later in 1968 President Johnson got a bill passed that ended discrimination in housing. After the passage of the Voting Rights act of 1965 , the Civil Rights Movements began to move away from it non-violent roots. The new head of the SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, popularized the term Black Power. Influenced by the philosophy of Malcolm X, the leader of the Nation of Islam, Black Power called for black separatism and