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Researching the History of the Civil Rights Movement Essay

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Overview of a Search Process (Gardner), Followed by Student Findings While there are many histories of the Civil Rights Movement (including books and online sources) that I might have consulted, I deliberately restricted my search to three sources?Facts on File, The New York Times Index, and The Reader?s Guide to Periodical Literature?in order to assess how magazine and newspaper coverage of the time reported events that we now understand as historically significant. One of the first things I discovered was that ?Civil Rights Movement? wasn?t a heading in the Times Index: this suggests that the various attempts to boycott businesses and local bus services, or integrate lunch counters, were still so separate and so small as to gather …show more content…

Under the subheading of South I found a reference to a Commonweal article entitled ?Death in Mississippi? (9/23/55), which reported on the murder of Emmett Lewis Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who was murdered (allegedly for making sexual advances toward a white woman). From there, I went to ?Till, Emmett? as a subject heading, and discovered a total of fifteen articles on the murder and subsequent trial (the two white men accused in this first trial were acquitted by an all-white jury September 23rd, less than a month after Till?s body was discovered). Of the three sources I used, Facts on File was least helpful, although it did note that on May 31, 1955 the Supreme Court ruled that integration of public schools must proceed with ?all due deliberate speed.? As the report mentioned, the justices did not specify this ?speed? by setting deadlines, and Southern governors and senators openly stated that they took this refusal to set a deadline as a message that they could go on as before. 1955 was in the middle of one of the largest civil rights movements in the history of the United States. Tension was building between the blacks and the whites and tension was especially high in the south. Jim Crow laws in the south created even more tension the south by creating the ?separate but equal? doctrine. On December 1, 1955 a lady named Rosa Parks finally stood up to the Jim Crow laws. Mrs. Parks was riding a bus in Montgomery,

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