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The Civil Rights Movement Essay

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Even though civil rights were granted to blacks during the Reconstruction, prejudice kept blacks from participating in many liberties that whites did. The Southern United states were especially heinous in their treatment of blacks. Eventually, African-Americans grew tired of being kept down because of the color of their skin. After all, they were humans that were endowed with the ability to think and reason, able bodies to perform tasks and feelings. It only took a few black men and women to take a stand to start an avalanche of action to change the nation’s view of African-Americans. The Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 was the first large-scale protest that lasted almost a year in which forty thousand blacks stopped riding Montgomery …show more content…

More often than not, the facilities that were to be used by African-Americans were not equal. These laws continued and in 1892, a man by the name Homer Plessy, who was of extremely fair complexion sat on a train , in the first class white section. He then informed the conductor that he was only one-eighth African American. He was asked to sit in the car that was reserved for colored men. When he refused, he was arrested and he pled his case all the way to the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. In a landmark of misguided judgment, it was upheld that the Jim Crow laws were constitutional. The ruling was overturned in 1954 in conjunction with another civil rights case, Brown v. Board of Education, which ended school segregation. Another event that was under the surface before the bus boycott was the brutal bludgeoning of a 14 year-old African American boy, Emmitt Till in August of 1955. He was from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi when he whistled at a young white woman. Young Emmitt was not aware of the oppressive Jim Crow laws and was dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, beaten then shot to death. His body was then dumped in a river, where he was found three days later. His mother refused to hold a closed casket funeral that would have hidden his grotesquely bloodied, beaten, gouged and swollen face. She wanted everyone to be a witness to

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