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 sidew!alk 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
One of the most horrid days in the 60's would have to go down in the books as March 7, 1965. It was a Sunday and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital, Montgomery (Microsoft). Also, there to help organize the voting rights march, was Martin Luther King, Jr. (Robinson 5). This was a distance of about fifty miles. Over five hundred marchers were stopped just outside of Selma by state troopers and were told to go home. The marchers refused and as a result the police then attacked. They beat and tear-gassed the protestors. Seventy people went to the hospital that day. Luckily there were television cameras on the scene to record the bloody incident and show the United States viewers what was really going on. The scenes shocked everyone and Lyndon Johnson was prompted to deplore the violence. This day would be called Bloody Sunday. SCLC petitioned a federal district judge for an order that would allow the! 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). "Biography(Martin Luther King, Jr.)". Retrieved November 18, 1999 from the World Wide Wed: http://members.aol.com/StephanieR/MLK/ Stokely Carmichael attended Howard University in 1960 and became active in the civil rights movement. He participated in sit-ins along with many other students and joined the Non-violent Action Group in Washington. He was arrested in 1961 when participating in the Freedom Rides, a campaign against segregation in interstate transportation, by trying to integrate a bus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi. He ended up spending most of his summer vacation in jail that summer. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in philosophy. In 1966, he was elected as a chairperson of SNCC. Carmichael then started to give speeches and was looked upon as a successor of Malcolm X. In 1969, he moved to Africa where he changed his name to Kwame Ture, a named derived from two African leaders, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sekou Toure of Guinea. He established a permanent home in Guinea that year and only returned on occasions to the United States to give lectures (Microsoft). 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 discipl
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Approximate Word count = 2277
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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