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Civil Rights Movement Research Paper

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Four days after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was put into place which outlawed the refusal to sell or rent to someone based on colour race, religion, sex or national origin. this was a result of the civil rights movement campaigning against housing discrimination in the US. Despite the historic achievement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation in relation to housing still continued in the US. From 1950 to 1980, African American's living in urban areas in the US increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million, this was a result of White American's moving out of the cities into suburban areas taking employment opportunities away from African Americans that were needed in order to remain in suburban communities. …show more content…

Census Bureau: Page has moved. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/annual09/ann09t22.xls
A graph showing the percentage of African American families living in poverty from 1959 to 2012. It also shows the difference between Black families with no male present to all Black families. You can see from the graph that there has been a gradual decline from the 1960's which shows that the civil rights movement has had a positive impact towards minimizing the percentage of poverty within African Americans.
In the midst of the civil rights movement, President Johnson declared that the US had an "unconditional war on poverty", to which he then he signed the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964 as an effort to try and eradicate poverty among African Americans. As well as the Economic Opportunity Act the Office of Economic Opportunity was created in order to administer the local application of federal funds aiming at poverty. It is perceived that the factor the civil rights movement only focused on was desegregation and to secure legal recognition and citizenship, when the movement was heavily focused on the improvement of poverty and employment. Before Martin Luther King, Jr's assassination he aimed at promoting the link between the civil rights movement and poverty. In 1968, the midst of the movement, the main organisations aimed at turning the movement towards the problem of poverty among African Americans in the US. The main effort in relation to the Civil Rights Movement was the Poor People's Campaign in 1968, that aimed at gaining economic justice for poor people in the US. King called it the "new phase" in the civil rights

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