How did Americans challenge racist laws?

During this time racism was still sweeping though the country. Black singers, poets, and authors began to express the hardships they faced in their work. President Harry Truman created a Committee on Civil Rights (CCR). The CCR wanted congress to pass laws to stop, lynching, voting discrimination, and racial job discrimination. Citizens began to realize that the term “Separate but equal” was really not equal at all. Public school segregation began being questioned. In Brown v. Board of education, the court ruled that separating schoolchildren made black children feel “inferior.” Slowly but surly schools that were previously separated by race became integrated. Yet seventy percent of schools in the south remained segregated even …show more content…
The city responded to this boycott by sending its leaders to jail and violence broke out. Whites who favored segregation set off bombs in four black churches. The black community pushed though the violence and ultimately the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on bus lines (but not on buses themselves). MLK became a light for the black community. He believed in equality and preached love and nonviolence. He built a following among the black and also white community. However, violence was still a major theme during this time. A black leader of the NAACP thought that blacks needed to defend themselves from violence even with guns if it was necessary. When a local KKK leaders attacked a NAACP leader’s home the armed blacks fried back and the KKK members left. Even though this event favored violence, nonviolence was the main practice. Four black college freshmen decided to sit down at a white lunch counter in downtown North Carolina. They were not served but refused to leave, ultimately the lunch counter closed for the day. This protest however, was far from over. They returned day after day gathering more black members to bring with them. These “sit-ins”