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Civil Rights Struggles Of The 1950s And 1960's

Decent Essays

4. Evaluate the progress towards racial equality in the United States since the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Following the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s a progression of racial equality entered the United States. During this time period African Americans were surrounded by the problems of equality amongst them and the white people. Every since the origin of the Civil Rights racial, equality has grown immensely. Even though there still exists partial racism and racial segregation today, our world has restrained from the harsh racism that was about back in the day before the Civil Rights. The attitude that whites have towards blacks nowadays has traumatically altered within the decades. African Americans lives …show more content…

Before the Civil Rights, most African Americans were not well educated. Most did not go to school and could not read nor write. Those fortunate to go to school, went to schools with less financial support, less well paid teachers, and fewer books. The white people were afraid of the black people challenging them in receiving jobs. In order to discharged of segregation amongst schools, it started with removing the signs that read “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” in areas such as cafeteria tables, churches, schools, and water fountains. The 1954 Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education was the prime responsibility of outlawing segregated education. From here on out African Americans began to gain their rights to equal education as the whites. They became more advance in their education: “in 1998 88 percent of African Americans aged twenty-five to twenty-nine had graduated from high school and approximately 15 percent had completed at least a bachelor’s degree” (Cha-Jua 21). The difference throughout the years of gaining higher education as African Americans is very obvious through the fact that in 1971 the average seventeen-year-old African American could read no better than an eleven-year-old white child. However, by the 1980’s, African Americans in their senior year of high school were reading only two and a half years behind the white students. Once getting an education,

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