When someone says “music”, one might think of a favorite song or band; not necessarily what kind of an impact music truly has. When someone says “segregation”, the mind thinks of multiple things not being able to be together. But people not being able to be together are not always a common one. The merging of these two things starting a revolution that lasted decades. With the power of music and famous people, integration was procured between the white and African American cultures.
White people always saw themselves as being “above” the African Americans. For too long “’triple evils of racism, economic exploitations and militarism’ explaining the perils of capitalism and how that system is slanted against Americanized Africans” (“Dr. Martin …show more content…
Such as musicians, actors/actresses, even artists. A name that is familiar to every person in the 1950s was the legendary rock artist, Elvis Presley. Elvis had a way of capturing the audience’s attention and holding it. The “teenage enjoyment of rock ‘n’ roll” (Welch 5) was the biggest constituent of this revolution. The music let them be and express themselves in a way they could not do before. Although the younger community enjoyed the mixture of music, the adults did not. The adults saw Elvis as a sexual figure because of the way he danced and wanted nothing to do him or his music. This ended up sparking controversy between the public and Presley’s producers. Another beneficial figure during this time was Doctor Martin Luther King Junior. Martin Luther King was a demonstrative leader within the black community. One thing that made him very different from all the other leaders was that he believed in non-violent protest. Through these protests a kind of civil disobedience was obtained by the African American communities. Doctor Martin Luther King Junior talks about a girl who “refused to give up her seat to a Caucasian man on a Montgomery Bus” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on capitalism: ‘This is not just’ 1). This situation then led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott lasted 381 days, where African Americans did not ride city buses, almost causing the bus line to go bankrupt. The state legislation was given no choice but to allow black people to sit where they wanted on the bus no matter who asked them to move. Someone who never got enough recognition for her part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott was Rosa Parks. Miss Parks was a “NAACP who had been trained in peaceful resistance, refused to giver up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger” (Purdy 6). Even though Rosa Parks was sitting in the colored section of the bus, she was arrested for not giving it to the white passenger. Very