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The Civil Rights Movement (1955- 1965) Essay

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Civil Rights Movement in the United States, was a political, legal, and social struggle to gain full citizenship rights for African Americans and to achieve racial equality. The civil rights movement was a challenge to segregation, the system of laws and customs separating blacks and whites.

During the civil rights movement, individuals and organizations challenged segregation and discrimination with a variety of activities, including protest marches, boycotts, and refusal to abide by segregation laws. Some believe that the movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there is still however some debate about when it began and whether it has ended yet. The civil rights movement …show more content…

Segregated facilities were not as common in the North, but blacks were usually denied entrance to the best hotels and restaurants. Schools in New England were usually integrated, but those in the Midwest generally were not. The most difficult part of Northern life was the intense economic discrimination against blacks.
Blacks fought against discrimination whenever possible. In the late 1800s blacks sued in courts to put an end to separate seating in railroad cars, states disfranchisement of voters, and denial of access to schools and restaurants. One of the cases against segregation was Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that separate but equal accommodations were constitutional.

To protest segregation, blacks created new national organizations. The National Afro-American League, in 1890; the Niagara Movement in 1905; and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
The NAACP became one of the most important black protest organizations of the 20th century. The historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the early leaders of the NAACP.

In the postwar years, the NAACP's legal strategy for civil rights continued to succeed. They were now led by Thurgood Marshall. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on five cases that challenged elementary- and secondary-school segregation, and in May

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