the fight for equality
Imagine:
-being unable to eat or sleep in most restaurants
or hotels
-being unable to sit where you wanted in a movie
theatre
-having to sit in the back when you boarded a bus,
even an empty one
-being forced to attend an inferior school
-even being forbidden to drink from certain water
fountains
This was a way of life for most blacks in the South as recently as 1960. They were citizens of a country founded on the principle that all men were created equal. In the middle 1950's, a movement arose to challenge this way of life. They succeeded because in a democracy, when the people speak, the government must listen.
The end of the Civil War brought a brief glimpse of freedom. The 13th Constitutional Amendment passed in 1964, protected the rights of newly freed slaves; the 15th Amendment, passed on July 9, 1965, gave black citizens the right to vote. This promise was broken; many southern whites were determined to keep blacks poor, uneducated, and powerless.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was formed by a group of Confederate Army veterans. They used terrorism and violence to establish the reign of white supremacy. Between 1882 and 1901, nearly 2,000 blacks were lynched. By 1910, blacks were caught in a degrading system throughout the South. As Klan violence surged, blacks moved to the North.
Through the "Jim Crow" laws, blacks were ordered to use seperate facilities. The court ruled that as long as seperate facilities were equal, they were legal.
W.E.B DuBois, along with other black and white leaders, established to National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. By time the NAACP was 10 years old, more than 2 million whites belonged to the KKK.
Historians trace the modern civil rights movement back to May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregated schools "inherently unequal"; thus, they outlawed segregation in public schools. On December 21, 1956, the US Supreme Court outlawed bus segregation.
On the night of December 5, 1955, 15,000 gathered to hear Martin Luther King Jr. This was the beginning of a great man who fought to his death for equality. In August, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I have a dream" speech.
The civil rights movement ended legal apartheid in the South and forever
changed relations between blacks and whites. It continues today in
the battle against inequalities and injustices that remain. index.htm