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The Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. And John F. Kennedy

Decent Essays

The Civil Rights Movement “I Have a Dream,” this was a famous speech written and spoken by one of the main leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, his name was Martin Luther King Jr. The Civil Rights movement was a protest held from the mid 1950’s and the late 1960’s. Although the Emancipation Proclamation was approved over 100 years before, blacks were still being treated unequally. Thousands of people rose up and protested because of this, but some of them stood out from the rest. These main protestors were Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy.
The start of the movement was in December of 1955, when Rosa Parks, a black woman from Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white person on the bus. The southern custom was to let the white people sit in the front of the bus while the black people sat in the back. She was jailed because she disobeyed the law, and a boycott came to power right after she was condemned. This boycott involved a black community not using the city …show more content…

He realized how significant the boycott was and that Gandhi's nonviolent tactics could be used by Southern blacks. King remained the major spokesperson in Montgomery, but no one seemed to act upon what he was talking about. On February 1, 1960 four freshmen in North Carolina began a wave of sit-ins. This was designed to end segregation at lunch counters. During the summer of 1963, the number of protests had risen and one huge protest in civil rights history began. It was the March on Washington, which cultivated over 200,000 participants, this is where King delivered his famous speech, “I Have a Dream.” One part of this speech capture the spirit of the protest, King said, “I have a dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed–we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created

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