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Civil Rights Movement: The Black Lives Matter Movement

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Today, the streets are filled with riots, not peaceful protests of aware citizens completing sit-ins and boycotts challenging the societal norms of segregation and racism, but ignorant citizens demanding rights already given. Many revere the Black Lives Matter campaign as the birth of a new civil rights movement. To others the movement simply negates the substantial progress the civil rights movement made for the black man in America.
The Black Lives Matter Movement emerged in 2012 shortly after a Florida teen, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed by a white male, who later was found not guilty. The movement was first formed to combat and oppose police brutality that targeted the black community. However, the movement’s leaders released a list …show more content…
Frederick Douglass believed white America did not need to turn to reparations in order to fix the great sin of slavery, but rather give the black man suffrage and halt the creation of obstacles for the black man to rise up in society. For Frederick Douglass this was justice. He wrote, “The nearest approach to justice to the negro for the past is to do him justice in the present. Throw open to him the doors of the schools, the factories, the workshops, and of all mechanical industries. For his own welfare, give him a chance to do whatever he can do well. If he fails then, let him fail!” Douglass believed society needed to do the black man justice because it is right, not because they have previously been denied equality and citizenship through the institution of slavery. Equality is a much slower process, the longer the time, the more progress becomes a reality, whereas reparations aim at going back in order to repair the wrongs of the past, such as slavery, and is a menial task not solving anything that will endure. Nothing lasting will come from artificial forcing. The road to equality entails a change of mind and heart, which is not something that can happen based on a movement’s platform and …show more content…
Society owes him nothing and should simply “untie his hands” and he would stand on his own. Through untying the black man’s hands, the barriers standing between him and basic societal life are lifted. Then voting, schooling, and proper job placement are achievable. Anything more than lifting barriers is not necessary and would be an unjust handout. Wrongful reparations hinder the black man and would be an

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