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The Civil Rights Movement Of The 1950s And 1960s

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This essay will discuss the impact of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s on the lives of African-Americans in that period. The Civil Rights movement refers to the movement which aimed to remove racial discrimination and segregation and improve the social, political, legal, and economic rights of black people in America . Although slavery had been abolished with the end of the Civil War , the “Jim Crow” laws kept black people and white people segregated from each other and the voting rights of African-Americans were limited , however, by the 1950s, African-Americans had begun to mobilise to gain equal rights under the law . This essay will discuss social challenges in the 1950s and 1960s to the discriminative laws and the …show more content…

King may have inspired others within the Civil Rights movement with his nonviolent tactics; for example, the students who started the Greensboro Sit-Ins in 1960 ‘admired King’ . however, King did begin to lose sympathy towards the end of his life with his opposition to the Vietnam War- an opinion poll at the time stated that 73% of Americans and 48% of black people disagreed with his opposition, and 60% even stated that his opposition had hurt the Civil Rights movement . This may have paved the way for other types of protest- in the 1960, there was a rise in more radical black groups, such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Movement. These groups preached black nationalism and preferred the use of violence rather than nonviolence, with Malcolm X, one of the principal figures in the Nation of Islam, encouraging African-Americans to gain equal rights ‘by any means necessary’ . X preached against integration, comparing it to adding cream to coffee , and stated that ‘if you're afraid of Black Nationalism, you're afraid of revolution… if you love revolution, you love Black Nationalism’ . Although James Turner states that he was ‘a brother you could believe… he was in it because of his commitment to our liberation’ , and his rhetoric appealed to black students and people living in ghettos, the

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