Civil Rights Movement

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The 1950’s and the 1960’s were times of both struggle and achievement for the Civil Rights Movement, which none the less, had begun. The Civil Rights Movement began in earnest in 1952 when Linda Brown, an African third grader, challenged the segregation policies of the Topeka, Kansas public school system, which required her to walk one mile to a black elementary school, rather than to allow her to attend a white elementary school just blocks from her home. In that case, Brown Vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on May 17th, 1954, that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and therefore, deprived Linda Brown of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment.

After the Brown Vs. Board of Education decision, there was progress in desegregation all over the country, but this progress came with much sacrifice. In the years following the Brown Vs. Board of Education decision, the desegregation process began in public schools throughout the country. In 1957, formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, learned “that Integration is easier said than done.” (Civil Rights timeline p1) Specifically, nine black students enrolled for the fall semester there. Upon their arrival for the first day of classes, they were blocked by a crowd organized by the governor. In response, President Eisenhower ordered the National Guard to escort the students into school. The nine black students attended their first day of school on September 25th, 1957.

Five years later, in 1962, James Meredith was the first black student to enroll for classes at the University of Mississippi. The University of Mississippi was a state college in the most segregated state in the country. Many riots broke out in Mississippi in response to Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi and two people were killed during the rioting. Despite the violence and the threat of reprisals, civil rights activists kept fighting for the rights of blacks and other minorities.

In the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, the fight to desegregate America was not limited to the public school system. For example, in 1955, a bus boycott was ordered in Montgomery, Alabama. Up until the boycott, blacks were relegated to the back if a white boarded the bus. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery and sat in the fifth row, the first row blacks could occupy. A few stops later, all the rows in the front of her were filled with whites, and one white man was left standing. Under the law, blacks and whites could not sit in the same row of a bus, so the bus drive asked Rosa Parks and other blacks seated in the fifth row to move further back in the bus. All the blacks complied with the bus driver’s request, except Rosa Parks, who refused to do so. She was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. This led to a 381 day boycott of the Montgomery buses by blacks that ended only after a court battle in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation on buses unconstitutional.

Restaurants were also battlefields on which the war for desegregation was fought during the Civil Rights Movement. Many Restaurants refused to serve black patrons. In 1960, four black college students decided to have lunch at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. When the four tried to order lunch, they were denied service by the manager. The four students, rather then leaving, stayed at the counter until closing time. The next day, the same four students returned to the Woolworth’s lunch counter, but this time accompanied with additional people. Again they were not served, and again they sat at the counter until closing. The four repeated this routine for several more days, and by the fifth day, three hundred people, black and white, protested the refusal of Woolworth’s to serve the four black college students. Despite the protest, North Carolina passed even stricter segregation laws, which led to the arrest of the forty-five people. This only made people angrier, and the boycott grew stronger and affected other restaurants. Six months later, due to tremendous loss in profits, many restaurants desegregated, including Woolworth’s.

Although the Civil Rights Movement achieved much progress in the 1950’s and 1960’s, proponents of racism and enemies of equality dug in and fought hard to halt the movements in progress. One enemy of the Civil Rights Movement was the white supremacy group known as the Ku Klux Klan. In the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, the Ku Klux Klan engaged in many violent attacks on blacks and civil rights workers in an effort to stop the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) from achieving it goals, which were “to expand black voter registration, to organize a legally constituted ‘freedom democratic party’ that would challenge the whites-only Mississippi Democratic party, to establish ‘freedom schools’ to teach reading and math to black children, to open centers where indigent blacks could obtain legal and medical assistance.” (Mississippi & Freedom Summer p2) During that summer, the Klan burned sixty- one crosses at different locations all over Mississippi, and burned down black churches and freedom schools through out the state. In a six month period of time, the Klan burned down thirty homes owned by blacks and thirty-seven churches. The reason why so many acts of violence were committed was because of the Mississippi Summer Project.

Timeline