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I Am A M The Civil Rights Movement

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Title “I am a man”. “I am a woman”. “Equal rights for all”. When our founding fathers developed this country, they wanted equal rights for all, but they did not mean all. What about the suppressed Africans, who were forcibly torn from their mother country and country men? Even after they were no longer slaves, it wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement that things started to change. Still considered 3/5 of a man, as once was wrote in the constitution, African Americans were still being denied the right to vote, or for jobs, while still experiencing segregation and discrimination. Today, although, racism has improved, the protest in Ferguson has shown we still have a long way to go. Civil right movement background info During the civil rights movement African Americans, particularly the younger generation fought against white supremacy. The older generation in comparison have been “so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodyness” that they have adjusted to segregation” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.). Many African Americans were discriminated against but to fight against it could ruin they’re way of life, they found “…their state intolerable, but are too heavily oppressed to change it, they are simply pawns in the hands of larger powers” (James Baldwin, 90). Many people during the Civil Rights movement were arrested, harassed or much worse. The younger generation could present they’re “…very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the
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