After the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation were passed on January 1 in 1963, African Americans were never fully granted their freedom as citizens until decades later. The Civil Rights Movement was a period of non-violent protesting against racial prejudice towards people of color and to gain equal rights under the law in America. Many African American women and men, along with several whites, led and coordinated the movement to nationwide and regional levels. They protested through legal means, arbitrations, petitions, and nonviolent protest demonstrations. Some major Civil Rights Leaders who ultimately helped the movement become prosperous included, Dorothy Height, John Lewis and the eminent Martin Luther King Jr. The Civil rights …show more content…
Before the movement was even initiated, there were Jim Crow Laws that burdened the way of life for colored persons. The “Jim Crow” name comes from the early 1830s when the white actor Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice acted as the fictional “Jim Crow,” a representation of a clumsy, dim-witted black slave using blackface and performing jokes and songs in a stereotypical slave dialect. Jim Crow laws enforced and legalized racial segregation in the South starting in 1865 after the 13th amendment was ratified. It prohibited use of public white facilities like schools, movie theaters, transportation, and restaurants. It became frequent to not see signs posted that warned African Americans that they weren’t allowed there. Many colored people also lived in severe poverty. Blacks were at the bottom of the work hierarchy and were controlled in the workplace by whites. They had to join these relationships, being that the only other options were starvation or unemployment. These meager incomes led many to live in slum neighborhoods, where housing was usually over-crowded, usually dilapidated, and …show more content…
The black children received fewer years of formal education and the minimal education that they did receive was poorer of quality. There were fewer funds for colored schools, hence why they had substandard teaching materials and programs. Without the necessary funds, the schools couldn’t afford many books, highly educated teachers, or even enough classrooms. Few instances were where no black schools offered any courses leading to a Ph.D. or any architecture and engineering courses to its students. Law and medical courses were only offered in one or two black colleges, while in white schools there were numerous courses for these subjects. This led to major events like Brown vs. The Board of Education and the Little Rock Nine. The Brown vs. Board of Education incident started when Linda Brown was denied admittance to an all-white elementary school in Topeka. In Oliver Brown’s (Linda’s Father) lawsuit, Brown claimed that all-black schools were not equal to the all-white schools, and that segregation violated the “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which expressed no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Supreme Court’s decision was that state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional. The decision then led to the “Little Rock