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Equality for Americans: How African Americans Achieved Equality

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African Americans throughout the road to gain racial equality exercised many methods in order to attain such liberties. We start our exploration by viewing the most paramount methods to acquire racial equality; these methods included lobbying public officials through the court system and through peaceful public protests. We'll lastly address the violent methods used to gain racial equality but see how they were mostly unavailing.

There were diffused ideals among African American leaders on how to handle racial inequalities in society during the progressive era, but its leaders would form the pathways on which future generations would commence on in gaining racial equality. Following is a part of an essay written by African American …show more content…

Shortly before the march was scheduled to take place, Roosevelt caved in. He issued an executive order forbidding discrimination in defense industries because of 'race, creed, color, or national origin.” (Cavallo, 139). This lead African Americans to hold further marches such as the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 (Hewitt, 832). The effect of the almost march conducted by A. Philip Randolph in 1941 was that over 700,000 African Americans left the South to gain access to the jobs that opened up because of Roosevelt's executive order (Cavallo, 139). Though peaceful protests and court appeals were the most common forms of gaining racial equality, and arguably the most effective, violence found its place.

Most African Americans who used violence as a means to acquire racial equality used it purely as a form of defense in their communities. The following excerpt from the essay “Race, Gender, and the Civil Rights Movement: The Struggle in Mississippi” by Steve Estes, that's included in the book Public Lives/Public Moments, gives us an illustration of African Americans using self-defense and their struggles with it even being leaders of the NAACP, “The debate came to a head in 1959. That year, the national leadership of the NAACP [Nation Association for the Advancement of Colored People] denounced the militant stance taken by Robert Williams. A veteran of the

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