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The Civil Rights Movement : A Long Term Initiative Essay

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The Civil Rights Movement circa 1940-1982

The Civil Rights Movement was a long-term initiative to overcome the unequal world of disenfranchisement, segregation, and other forms of oppression such as the Jim Crow laws. The period of the civil rights reform can be divided into several phases such as the “prehistory” of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1930s to 1954, the “Lunch counter” phase during the years 1955 to 1965, the Black Power Movement beginning in 1965 and progressing until mid 1975, and lastly, the post-civil rights and post-black power era. During each phase, the movement began with isolated, small-scale protests and ultimately resulted in the emergence of organized, some militant, some non-violent movements led by various organizations. While the movement could be divided into phases, they were not isolated incidents, each phase evolved or carried into the next movement. Due to the depth of each era, it is impossible to combine all the historical facts into one paper. However, three epigraphs from, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, written by Manning Marable, summarizes the development of the Civil Rights Movement over the era of 1940 to 1982. The first epigraph, quoted by Harold Cruse in Rebellion or Revolution, acknowledges that although all classes of African Americans wanted civil rights, emphasis was placed on the NAACP, composed of mostly middle class individuals, and the larger struggles, which in turn, ignored the working class and how much of their

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