Transcript civil rights - Crawfordsocialstudies

THE CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Early Struggles
Introduction
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Sit-Ins
The “Acts” of the Movement
Freedom Rides
March on Washington
Historical Figures
THE EARLY STRUGGLES
•Plessy v. Ferguson Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the "White" car of the East
Louisiana Railroad. Plessy was only one-eighths black and seven-eighths white, but
under Louisiana law, he was considered black and therefore required to sit in the
"Colored" car
•Not until 1954, in the equally important Brown v. Board of Education decision,
would the "separate but equal" doctrine be struck down.
•Sweatt v. Painter: Herman Sweatt was a black who wanted to attend the University of
Texas Law School. The law school denied him admission solely because of his race
•The murder of 14 year old Emmett Till in 1955 after speaking to a white woman in an
“inappropriate” manner
•After decades of silently enduring second-class citizenship, blacks in the late 1940s
and early 1950s began to challenge the injustices they faced on a daily basis
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
•After decades of silently enduring secondclass citizenship, blacks in the late 1940s
and early 1950s began to challenge the
injustices they faced on a daily basis
•The Civil Rights Movement was at a peak
from 1955-1965
•The Civil Rights movement resulted in
Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
guaranteeing basic civil rights for all
Americans, regardless of race, after nearly
a decade of nonviolent protests and
marches
MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT
•December 1, 1955 was the day when the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama,
decided that they would boycott the city buses until they could sit anywhere
they wanted, instead of being relegated to the back when a white boarded
•Technically the movement started in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give
her seat on the bus after all the seats were taken
•Dr Martin Luther King was made president of the Montgomery
Improvement Association and intended for the boycott to last a day but voted
to continue
•Blacks in Montgomery refused to ride the city buses, walking to work and
developing a taxi system amongst the black community
MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT
(CONT)
•Businesses were losing money because of the boycott so whites tried
everything they could to end it
• King's home was bombed on January 30, and Nixon's home was bombed on
February 1
•On February 21, 89 blacks were indicted under an old law prohibiting
boycotts. King was the first defendant to be tried. As press from around the
nation looked on, King was ordered to pay $500 plus $500 in court costs or
spend 386 days in the state penitentiary.
•November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal court's
ruling, declaring segregation on buses unconstitutional. The Montgomery Bus
Boycott was officially over.
SIT INS
•The overall purpose of sit ins were for students to be served at lunch
counters despite their skin color, and to do so without violence and with
respect
•On February 27 in Nashville, students were attacked by a group of white
teenagers. Police arrived, but they let the white teens go while arresting the
protesters for "disorderly conduct
•The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was formed and they led a
sit in of over 70,000 participants in 1961
•The Civil Rights Act of 1964 declared segregation at lunch counters unlawful
•The technique of the sit-ins was used to integrate other public facilities, such
as movie theaters
SIT INS (CON’T)
THE “ACTS” OF THE MOVEMENT
•The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - was a landmark piece of legislation in the
United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against blacks and
women, including racial segregation. It ended unequal application of voter
registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace
and by facilities that served the general public
•The Voting Rights Act of 1965 - outlawed discriminatory voting practices
that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African
Americans in the U.S.
FREEDOM RIDES
•A new journey reconciliation called the Freedom Rides and the strategy was
to have an interracial group would board buses destined for the South. The
whites would sit in the back and the blacks in the front. At rest stops, the
whites would go into blacks-only areas and vice versa
•They left Washington DC on May 4, 1961 with intentions to arrive in New
Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Brown decision. They met
little resistance in the upper South but on May 14, after the group split, one
group was met by an angry mob. They were stoned, tires were slashed, and the
bus was firebombed
•The second group was attacked beaten. The Public Safety Commissioner
claimed bus depots were closed for the holiday yet they knew and stayed away
•The boycott ended after the bus company didn’t want to risk its bus drivers
safety any longer
MARCH ON WASHINGTON
•Civil Rights groups united to organize a March on Washington after Kennedy
proposed the civil rights bill. Organizers drew over 250,000 people from
around the nation, arrived in DC on August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial.
There, they heard speeches and songs from numerous activists, artists, and
civil rights leaders. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered the closing address, his
famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
•Even though the civil rights bill wasn’t passed for another year, the day was
an overwhelming success. There was no violence and the event received
extensive media coverage.
HISTORICAL FIGURES
•Martin Luther King – preacher, activist, and prominent leader in the African
American Civil Rights movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in
the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using
nonviolent methods following the teachings of Gandhi.
•Rosa Parks - was an African American civil rights activist, whom Congress called
"the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement.
Secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, she was known for sparking the
Montgomery Boycott
•Thurgood Marshall - the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court.
Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high
success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown vs.
Board of Education. He was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson
in 1967.