Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
214,144
edits
Civil Rights Movement: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
Line 1:
{{Useful Notes}}
{{cleanup|This article nearly-exclusively discusses the United States of America, completely ignoring the Civil Rights movements taking place in other countries in the post-[[World War II|WWII]] era of the 1950s and 1960s. The article needs to be moved away from being an example of [[Eagle Land]], and re-written to provide a more global picture of the Movement.}}
[[File:civilrights.png|frame|Prominent figures of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Clockwise from left: W. E. B. Du Bois, [[Malcolm X]], Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr.]]
Line 9:
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."
The second catalyst was a moment towards the end of 1955, when (in a case similar to Viola Desmond's arrest in 1946 in Canada for being in a whites-only seat in a theater) a woman by the name of Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person, as was demanded by standard bus policy at the time in the city of Montgomery, Alabama. The act wasn't meant to be a major protest action by Parks, but after the bus driver had her arrested for refusing to give up her seat, things snowballed as Rosa's act of defiance against institutionalized racism made her a lightning rod for the various factions within the black community to rally behind. A young minister named Martin Luther King Jr., along with local NAACP head E. D. Nixon, decided to use Rosa's arrest as the rallying cry to unite the black community of the south to end the busing discrimination issue via a mass boycott of the offending bus company. It was a long struggle, but King and the movement prevailed against the municipal government's frantic attempts to frustrate them and acts of violence by both natives and incoming thugs to try to intimidate them.
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—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.
| |||