But all this didn't happen over night. It took years of struggle, reforms, sweat, and blood to bring us to the point of equality we are currently at. In this essay I will chart the history of one of the most important movements ever to hit America, the Civil Rights Movement.
African-Americans arrived in America about 350 years ago. They didn't come of their own free will, or to find a better way of life like other Americans. They were stolen out of their home land and shipped here to work as indentured servants. Those who came after 1661, when slavery became legal, never even had the chance at free life. They had absolutely no civil rights, and were treated in the most inhumane way possible. This heinous reality continued until 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln passed the Emancipation Proclamation, which legally freed all slaves in the rebellious states. This was the first big step towards actual freedom, but it's in the next hundred years that we see the true struggle.
The Civil rights movement actually begins in 1954 when Linda Brown was denied admission to a local white elementary school in Topeka, Kansas. Her law suit combined with others reached the Supreme Court in the milestone case of Brown v. The Board of Education. Finding it unconstitutional, Chief Justice Earl Warren overruled the case of Plessey v. Ferguson, which legalized the “separate but equal” law of segregated schooling, allowing for African-Americans to be admitted into white school.
The next critical event in the movement is the brutal murder of Emmett Till in August of 1955. While visiting family in Mississippi, he is said to have whistled at the wife of store owner Roy Bryant, who was needless to say, a white man. A few days later Emmett is kidnapped, horribly beaten, and shot in cold blood. His hardly recognizable body is thrown in the Tallahatchie River. Roy Bryant and his half brother are arrested for the murder. It took hardly and hour for the all white jury to acquit the two of the crime. They are later to have been recorded bragging about the murder in a magazine interview. Enraging the African-American community, this throws things into high gear.
That same year we have the acclaimed and courageous Rosa Lee Parks making another crucial move in Montgomery, Alabama. Being an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) she refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested, and creates incentive for the Montgomery Bus Boycott to go into action. This peaceful protest is successful and brings the brilliant Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into the picture. Dr. King played one of the most important roles in the Civil Rights Movement setting the stage for different forms of nonviolent protest. Rosa Parks is later award the Congressional gold medal in 1999.
With help from Charles K. Steele, and Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, giving him and fellow African-Americans grounds to progress in their civil rights activities. King had a strong philosophy of nonviolent resistance which ended him in jail on numerous occasions.
In September of 1957 in Little Rock Arkansas, nine African-American students, later to become known as the Little Rock Nine, are blocked from entering Central High School. Orval Faubus, the governor, orders this action in denial of the integration that is taking place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends in the military to act on behalf of the students.
On February 1st 1960, four African-American students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College are refused service at Woolworth's lunch counter and begin to stage a sit in. This act becomes a catalyst for many other sit-ins at all sorts of other public facilities all over the nation. Six months later the same four students are served at the lunch counter that they had previously been denied.
In April of that year the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is organized at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Caroline. This gives African-American students a voice in the Civil Rights Movement.
In May of 1961 we find the first wave of “freedom riders”. This is a group of student volunteers sent by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to test the laws of desegregation in public transit. They first encounter problems in Alabama where an angry mob lights their bus on fire in protest. This only fuels the movement and by the end of that summer over 1,000 students had participated in the transportation trials.
Then in October James Meredith enrolls at the University of Mississippi sending white students into a frenzy of violent riots. President Kennedy sends 5,000 troops over in support of Meredith.
Finally in April 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in Birmingham, Alabama during a peaceful protest. While incarcerated he writes his famous “letter from Birmingham Jail” in which he states that it the moral obligation of people to challenge unjust laws. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
And this is how The Civil Rights Movement helped shape America into the closer-to-equality country it is today. Hate Crimes are still in existence though, and it is still the obligation of not only Americans, but of all people world wide to take action, and not to hate, but to love for we are all but human beings, brothers and sisters in this home we share, this homeland called Earth.
