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The Civil Rights Movement And The Women's Rights Movement

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Since the late 19th century, the efforts of protest and activism have been more focused on the expansion of individual freedoms for minority groups and those who faced significant discrimination rather than equality for all people. Individual freedom is the right of every citizen in the United States and signifies that every person has a right to freely express themselves, move about the country, and have assurance of the security of their private property, among other things. The principal examples of this shift in focus to advancing individual freedoms are the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Rights Movement. Each of these movements was spurred by a group of people taking a stand against being refused their human rights. African Americans were long mistreated and discriminated against in the United States. They faced suffering of every kind, from not being able to eat in certain restaurants or use certain bathrooms to being denied the same educational rights and opportunities as white people. This latter point is especially evident in the fact that only twenty percent of African American veterans returning home from war in 1945 and 1946 were given education funding. Such discrimination is undeniable and representative of a broken society. The fact that eighty percent of black soldiers who survived the horrors of war were treated so unfairly in their own home country illustrates the need for expansion of individual freedoms for African Americans in the United
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