Civil Rights Movement: Difference between revisions

One of the most important events in American history, the Civil Rights Movement brought about the achievement of true racial equality under the law, after America largely spent the hundred years after the Civil War ignoring the fact that blacks and other minorities were still being treated like second class citizens with little to no rights in many parts of the country. The [[The Deep South|Southern states]], despite losing the [[American Civil War]] and the abolition of slavery (or [[Wild Mass Guessing|possibly]] ''[[Sore Loser|because]]'' [[Sore Loser|of those occurrences]]), had found numerous loopholes to keep blacks down: "Jim Crow" laws were drafted following the end of reconstruction in many Southern states, while the hypocritical and inherently flawed concept of "Separate but Equal" segregation denied minorities in the South basic rights. Black people even found it difficult to vote, despite having the right to, since states could (and did) impose literacy tests (extremely difficult ones, which were often rigged) and poll taxes.<ref>If you're wondering why these didn't apply to whites, it's because the laws had exemptions for people whose fathers or grandfathers could vote at the time of the law's passage. This is where we get the term "[[Grandfather Clause]]."</ref> Many other groups also faced discrimination by some.

The date when the [['''Civil Rights Movement]]''' started is not definitive and is still debated among historians; some credit the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, others when [[Harry Truman]] forcibly integrated the [[Yanks With Tanks|US Army]] during his presidency. Most often though, two moments in the 1950s stand out as the turning points which brought the movement together as far as catalysts go. The first one was ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the controversial 1896 ''Plessy v. Fergeson'' Supreme Court ruling which legalized segregation. "Brown" was a 9-0 ruling that basically called out the utter hypocrisy of segregation by way of pointing out that "separate but equal" was essentially code for "white people get nice things, but black people get barely functioning, barely usable versions of what white people take for granted."

Meanwhile, the north had similar incidents, such as in 1957 when the African American family of Bill and Daisy Meyers attempted to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, one of the famed suburban projects created by William Levitt to be model communities-- forcommunities—for whites only, that is. Although they and their supporters wanted no trouble, their very presences revealed that there was a lot of foul bigotry in them Little Boxes made out of Ticky-Tacky. Thus, their summer was a living hell, with angry mobs, destructive riots, and systematic racist harassment, aided and abetted by indifferent local police that finally prompted the State authorities to step in to stop it. Throughout it all, the Meyers and their friends stuck it out to become heroes who impressed Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson among others; Daisy was not called "The Rosa Parks of the North" for nothing.

Other people found their own glory. The Freedom Riders, for example, tested out a favorable Supreme Court decision on intercity bus stations to challenge segregation in the face of vicious resistance. That resistance included outright terrorism--suchterrorism—such as the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four little girls--ingirls—in the hopes of cowing African-Americans into submission. In 1964, the activists took it up still another level as they dared to enter the lion's mouth in Mississippi, the most virulently segregated state of them all, with "Freedom Summer". In that summer of ''[[Mississippi Burning]]'', idealistic northern college students, following the lead of the local activist leadership, took on the racist establishment with education, while their enemies were so afraid that they loaded up on cops and even a ''tank'' to stop them.

== In fiction: ==