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The Impact Of The Civil Rights Movement

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The issue of civil rights was a major one throughout the post-Civil War Reconstruction period and remained so throughout the period leading up to the Korean War in the 1960s. The civil rights struggle was caused largely by southern states’ treatment of African Americans. Slavery was a rampant practice in the pre-Civil War south, and even those African Americans who managed to obtain their freedom were not treated as equals to other citizens in the southern states. Free black men did not have the right to vote, own property, marry, or testify against other African Americans. After the Civil War, when slavery was abolished, there was a push for African Americans to gain equal rights to their white counterparts. This civil rights push lasted …show more content…

The Klan effectively dissolved for the first time in 1872, but opposition to the push for civil rights was still strong. In the 1870s, the push for civil liberties took multiple setbacks from the Supreme court, as the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Ku Klux Klan act of 1871 were both invalidated. Democrats also used scare tactics to suppress black voting to deprive Republicans of votes. With the loss of Republican power, blacks found the push for rights even more difficult. The end of World War 1 brought newfound racial tension, particularly in Chicago, where for there was a thirteen-day period in which whites and blacks violently attacked each other. Fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks were killed during the period. Other forms of opposition to the civil rights movement were Jim Crow laws. These laws segregated many public facilities such as schools, streetcars, parks, and even cemeteries. These facilities were variably inferior to those available to whites. Despite extensive opposition, the movement ended up being very successful. The victory that allowed the civil rights movement to form was the South’s loss in the Civil War. With it brought the period known as Reconstruction, which saw multiple victories for civil rights, including landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and constitutional amendments such as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which were a huge

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