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
Chalmers, D. (1991). And the Crooked Places Made Straight-The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s. Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press. m to march again without any interference from the police. Two weeks after Bloody Sunday, the march was redone with over three thousand people protesting. This march created the support needed to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law (Microsoft). Although the march to Montgomery was successful, the trip back was not for one white housewife who was driving marchers back. On the way back to Selma, some Ku Klux Klansmen overtook her and she was shot. State juries found the Klansmen innocent on the murder charge, but were eventually convicted in federal court for violating her civil rights (Chalmers 29). . Eheu! 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. ery citizen the right to vote regardless of intelligence, race, or any other reason. Also, in 1965, the Economic Opportunity Act was passed. This act aimed at calming riots and providing job training and employment for the poor and colored people (Bogal-Allbritten 12-13). By 1966, the mood and phase had changed. Street marchers were no longer effective and the civil rights movement was breaking up (Chalmers 44). 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 (Chalmers 17)" because the decade following the Brown decision "...witnessed a complex interplay of forces between black citizens striving to exercise their constitutional rights, the increasing resistance of southern whites, and the equivocal response of the federal government (Robinson 2)." "Biography(Martin Luther King, Jr.)". Retrieved November 18, 1999 from the World Wide Wed: http://members.aol.com/StephanieR/MLK/ Adams, J. (1998). Freedom Days-365 Inspired Moments in Civil Rights History. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2277
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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