Civil Rights Movement
The 1960's were one of the most significant decades in the twentieth century. The sixties were filled with new music, clothes, and an overall change in the way people acted, but most importantly it was a decade filled with civil rights movements. On February 1, 1960, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College in Greensboro went to a Woolworth's lunch counter and sat down politely and asked for service. The waitress refused to serve them and the students remained sitting there until the store closed for the night. The very next day they returned, this time with some more black students and even a few white ones. They were all well dressed, doing their homework, while crowds began to form outside the store. A columnist for the segregation minded Richmond News Leader wrote, "Here were the colored students in coats, white shirts, and ties and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill, and some of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and honored flag of the Southern States in the last war fought by gentlemen. Eheu! It gi
shville sit-in sites. Lawson was much like Martin Luther King, Jr.; he wet to India as a missionary and studied the philosophy of nonviolence with disciples of Ghandi (Adams 49). The sixties youth generation was, for the first time, a powerful force in the civil rights movement. During this time there was a lot of young people attending college. The number of college students had increased dramatically during this time. In 1946, there were 1.7 million college students. By 1960, this number had increased to 3.8 million and over the next five years increased to 6.5 million. In 1970, there were over eight million college students. Campuses revolted throughout the sixties against the Vietnam War and protested for civil rights, but then calmed down by the early seventies (Chalmers 68-69). It wasn't just the college campuses that revolted and rioted though. Riots were breaking out across the nation during the sixties. There was a riot in the summer of 1964 called the Red Summer riot and the following year the Long, Hot Summer riot went on. Urban riots in 1965-1967 challenged the notion that the civil rights movement had purged racial injustice from America (Robinson 1). Richard Flacks summed up the sixties as romanticism (the search for self-expression and a free life), antiauthoritarianism (opposition to arbitrary, centralized rule-making), egalitarianism (belief in popular participation and rejection of elitism), antidogmatism (rejection of ideology), moral purity (antipathy toward self-interested behavior and the "sell out" of the older generation), community (breakdown of interpersonal barriers, a desire for relationships), and antiinstitutionalism (distrust of conventional institutional roles and careers). Flacks was a previous leader of SDS (Chalmers 74). The sixties were filled with civil rights movements and great leaders guided people through this time. Before the sixties blacks may have been free persons in the United States, but they weren't looked upon as the same as everyone else. Blacks had almost no rights and couldn't vote. The sixties granted them their well-deserved rights. ves one pause"(Chalmers 21). As one can see, African-Americans didn't have it easy trying to gain their civil rights. Several Acts were passed in the 60's, such as Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. This was also, unfortunately, the time that the assassinations of important leaders took place. The deaths of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all happened in the 60's. Slavery in the United States existed from the early senventeenth century until 1865. It was put to an end by the combination of the Emancipation Proclamation, 1863, and then the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution. Although blacks may have been freed from slavery, it didn't mean that they were treated the same as everyone else. In 1896, Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court defined separate but equal standards. Rarely was anything equal though. Segregation went on until the landmark case, Brown vs. Board of Education, declared that separate schools based on race was unconstitutional (Microsoft). This case "...became the cornerstone of sweeping changes (
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2137
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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