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Civil Rights Movement
Viviane Jean xxxx

The Civil Rights Movement
America’s Founding Fathers centered political responsibility in their citizens, with James Madison arguing against the ancient assumption that a populace needed controlling from some higher force. Instead, as the Constitution allowed, America would trust in the wisdom of its people, deciding at large, through the nonviolent means of elections, who was most fit to lead and how. Still, nobody expected that an ignored and despised racial minority to be the ones who, two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution, would be the ones to face down hatred and push the United States back towards serving the will of the people. Yet that was exactly what the Civil Rights Movement was and it was achieved through nonviolence. Calling the ideals of the Founding Fathers “an unrealized dream” Martin Luther King, Jr. would say that the American people had “proudly professed the principles of democracy and… practiced the very antithesis…” (Branch, 2006). The Civil Rights Movement would be a long and deadly struggle, casting American race relations into international focus, and eventually fragmenting under internal pressures but it changed the country forever, resurrecting voting rights of the Fifteenth Amendment that had been enshrined after the Civil War and then buried, along with the rights of the black race, in the failure of Reconstruction.
One of the seminal works on both the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement is Taylor Branch’s account, which unfolds as a fairly straightforward narrative filled with details of major and minor events in the unfolding of the Movement that a casual student could ever need. If this trilogy were to be the only thing a student read about the Civil Rights era, s/he would come away quite well informed; it covers events from W.E.B. DuBois and the

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