His 145 – Civil Rights MovementEssay Preview: His 145 – Civil Rights MovementReport this essayCivil Rights MovementHIS/145Civil Rights MovementRosa May Parks, a young black lady who is said to have started it all. Some actually refer to her as the “Mother of the civil Rights Movement,” without her its wondered if the world today would be as peaceful and prejudice free as it is, for the most part. The bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 is when and where many say it all started. Rosa May Parks started it all when she refused to move to the back of the bus to sit in the “colored” seats. When Parks was forced off of the bus, literally, the black community gathered around her and boycotted the bus system. Motivated by this and the ongoing discriminatory laws the black community gathered and began to organize and direct their efforts to try and bring change to these discriminatory laws.
The Boycott that started it all put one of the greatest black ministers of all time on the national stage, Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. became a leader in the entire ordeal along with other religious leaders and civil rights activists and they soon adopted a strategy of “nonviolent resistance” to try and fight against discrimination and racially biased laws. The Civil Rights Movement had a purpose; the main goal was to protect voting rights for black Americans and to end segregation that was created by law. According to the New York Times a statement by the press was made regarding Martin Luther King Jr. it stated “The leadership that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. left to guide the non violent civil rights movement prayed today for “strength to keep us together”. “We do not understand,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a prayer. “We want to go some place, but you have taken our legs from us, and now many of us are lost”.
So was there change right off the bat? Many would say no, the Civil War passed, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were passed and finally it seemed as though some real progress was beginning to be seen regarding black Americans having rights. One reason for this is that after the Civil War many people in the South still had the same train of thought as they did before, their attitudes did not change immediately. So where did television come to play? The South could be considered pretty much secluded from the rest of the country at this time, much of the Civil Rights abuse remained within the South since no one outside of the South knew enough about what was going on to do anything. However, in the 1960s just about every home in America owned a television set. In the summer of 1963 the power of the media was used to the fullest extent and put to the test by the leaders of the Civil Rights movement and just about every home
The Southern news from 1963 and the rise of the “Southern Way” in the 1960s helped make slavery in the South a national problem.
The civil rights movement was very popular in the South because of a combination of ideas that the South saw as good for the people. Most notably the idea that all people should have the same legal right to vote. This was seen as the perfect way to encourage blacks to vote for the people and was popular for many reasons.
Not having seen a Southern television show before, I could see how such a concept gave rise to something of an all over Southern phenomenon.
I had read that William Barber (one of the last directors of The Black Comedy Company and one of the founders of Black Entertainment) was very very supportive of the idea that the South could be a better place without the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The idea went back to the 1850s and there was a time in the late 1940s after Reconstruction, when the Civil Rights Act of 1965 became a little more important than ever. It gave the United States the chance to actually end slavery and begin to end the Jim Crow South. However in the 1960s, a sense of the political will to start the civil rights movement was beginning to take hold in southern regions and that led to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement which was largely associated with the Black Social Justice Movement which was a group that saw the same things from the standpoint of being the most progressive group of Americans ever to be born.[2][3]
So to see the racial divisions and tensions that have been found between the U.S. South and the rest of the world in the last 30 years seems to me quite plausible.
I’m not saying that this wasn’t there, but with the increasing social disparity and more violence from the military, you can see that if you took time it seemed like all that had to happen was for the South to begin to have a look around for some real justice[4][5] after the War, but that was ultimately not going to be true in the short term. On the contrary it was becoming apparent at times that things weren’t going to be as fair as they were in the middle of the last 30 years between the parties, many people in those days were going to look at the big issues from the perspective of the South as people who had had more freedoms of choice than them and were still having issues with the government. It was an era where people were not going to feel comfortable with the South’s role as a nation, even though their personal experience felt like that was the reason for all those other issues being taken away. Many people in those days looked at all of this as an aberration and were pretty much going to blame the South because of that. Instead of having a conversation about whether the Southern states were fair or not, we were going to see things from a different perspective. With all of these social groups being so polarized in many ways, what is most interesting is that we now have a very large political class which represents many different opinions about some of the issues that many people find extremely worrying.
So how come the Civil Rights marches started?
In order to know more about the rise of the Black social justice movement then the next step is to try and understand the ways that what was happening was linked to something more, namely the Civil Rights Era. At the outset, the civil rights movement was primarily a fight about racial divisions and problems because as a social group you were opposed to the “blackness” in society. You were against the system that was being imposed on you. The African American majority wanted the black community to be white by default and the white majority wanted blacks everywhere on earth. If you were