This assignment has now reached the final stages of completion and only requires confirmation of the findings and thus the conclusions that will be made t

In conclusion, it can tentatively be argued that while the organisations leading the United States civil rights movement from 1954 to 1968 significantly improved the lives of Black Americans, they failed to bring about complete harmony and equality, as statistics show. These conclusions still require further confirmation from valid sources and the final submission will include the effects of further research. Legislative changes, particularly towards the end of the movement contributed to the liberation of Black Americans although it must be accepted that legislative change can only achieve so much and, as said by ...... "...'black' still goes with 'poor' in the eyes of many."

The SCLC was also one of the crucial organisations of the civil rights movement, founded in 1957 after the inspirational success of the Montgomery bus boycott. The organisation was founded by a number of Black Southern Baptist ministers, the only blacks that had any power and authority at the time and was thus labeled, "...the decentralized political arm of the black church" (Powledge, 1991, 94). Throughout the civil rights movement, its members of this organisation also believed that non-violent direct action would yield greater success than that of the NAACP's legislative strategies. As a former executive director of SCLC and member of congress, Andrew Young is able to accurately describe the SCLC's perspective of the NAACP's strategy. "At SCLC, we felt that changing laws was extremely slow and too dependant on just one sector of society-the legal sector. Our methods, resting on the foundations of court cases brought by the NAACP were quicker" (Young, 1996, 193). For this reason, the SCLC focused on ending segregation and fostering social justice by the use of non-violent direct action. This strategy was formulated by Dr Martin Luther King, who used the bible and the principles of Ghandi to justify the group's actions (SCLC, www.kcsclc.org). This strategy was found to be significantly successful in achieving social justice.

The initiation of the sit-in movement by a group of college students in 1960 and the consequential involvement of students at the time prompted the acting executive director of the SCLC of the time, Ella Baker to plan the co-ordination of their efforts. This established the SNCC, comprising of black college students in the South. Later in its time, the organisation succumbed to the influence of black power (under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael) and was recognised as one of the more militant activist groups (DiCanio, 1998).

In 1957, the first Civil Rights Act in eighty-two years was passed by the United States congress. The Civil Rights Act (1957), although weak in its policies was an important achievement of the activists groups, the NAACP and SCLC. The Civil Rights Commission in 1960 vigorously endorsed civil and human rights and presented startling statistics indicating the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South. In the same year, the Civil Rig

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Approximate Word count = 2023
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)