Civil Rights
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!
Bobby Seale was the founder and leader of the Black Panther Party. The BPP was founded on reaction to the racism he and his friend, Huey Newton, had experienced. The goals of their party were: to end police brutality, full employment, improve housing and education, and the exemption of blacks from military service. Seale organized many community-based activities. In 1967, he led a group of armed Black Panthers to Sacramento, California, to protest a gun-control bill being considered by the California state legislature. He and thirty others were arrested, but the media coverage of the event attracted attention and the organization grew. Seale was again arrested in 1968 along with seven others for indicting a riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Seale eventually left the Black Panther Party in 1974 (Microsoft). It gives 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. Martin Luther King, Jr., was an important figure that worked hard throughout the 60's in order to gain black Americans' civil rights. In 1959, King went to India where he studied Ghandi's techniques of nonviolence. Sit-in movements began in Greensboro and soon followed many others throughout the country. King was arrested in October of 1960 at a major Atlanta department store. The charges on all the other protestors were dropped. King was kept in jail on a charge of violating probation for a previous traffic arrest case. He was kept in jail for four months of hard labor. The next year, December 15, 1961, King was arrested while fighting to desegregate public facilities in Albany, Georgia. He was charged with obstructing the sidewalk and parading without a permit. King's home was bombed on May 11, 1963, and then there was an explosion at his headquarters in the Gaston Motel. In response to the bombings, blacks began to riot in Birmingham. King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the largest and most dramatic civil rights demonstration, the March on Washington, was the high point of the event. In 1964, King was named "Man of the Year" in Time magazine. King was then awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later on that year, December 10. King then set up a voter registration drive in Selma in February 1965. King's civil rights movements came to an abrupt halt when he was assassinated April 4, 1968, in the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. The president then declared April 7 a national day of mourning for King (Biography 1-7). On February 13, 1960, a man by the name of Rev. James Lawson, inspired by the Greensboro sit-in movement, convened the first sit-in movement mass meeting. He then set up a plan in which five hundred students, from Baptist Seminary, Fisk University, Meharry Medical, and Tennessee State, would be sent to downtown Nashville 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). With the death of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson took
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Approximate Word count = 2251
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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