Civil Rights

1. Introduction
The Civil rights movement was a mass popular movement to secure for African-Americans equal access
to and opportunities for the basic privileges and rights of USA citizenship. This movement had its roots in
the centuries-long efforts of African slaves and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish
the institution of slavery. Although American slaves were emancipated as a result of the Civil War and
were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to
the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next
century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s broke the pattern
of public facilities' being segregated by "race" in the South and achieved the most important
breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865—
77).

2. The Movement Address Three Areas

 Education
 Social Segregation
 Voting Rights

3. Historical Background
The issue of civil rights is essential to understanding the establishment and development of the United
States. The idea appears in the Declaration of Independence (1776) when the Founding Fathers
declared:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed
by their Creator with inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness."

Even though the Constitution included the Bill of Rights, from 1791, it also allowed slavery a menace
that threatened the very existence of the nation and resulted into Civil War. Even though the Civil War
brought an end to slavery, it did not bring civil, political and social equality for African Americans. For
most African-Americans, the Northern victory in the Civil War proved to be a false dawn. It would take
another 100 years before they could achieve and political equality.

a) Black Codes after Civil War

Despite the efforts of Radical Republicans in Congress, the white elite in the South did everything it
could to prevent blacks from gaining civic power. In reaction to the Civil Rights Act of every southern
legislature passed laws to restrict opportunities for blacks. These black codes, which ranged widely in
severity, outlawed everything from interracial marriage to loitering in public areas. One code outlawed
unemployment, which allowed white landowners to threaten their tenant farmers with eviction if they
decided to give up their land. The black codes in Mississippi were arguably the worst: they stripped
blacks of their right to serve on juries and testify against whites, and also outlawed free speech. Other
codes forced black children into unpaid apprenticeships that usually led to fieldwork.
 b) The Ku Klux Clan
Despite the progress blacks made in the South after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, racism
still existed, and angry whites sometimes resorted to violence to intimidate blacks. The most notorious
of these initiatives was the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society of white supremacists formed in Tennessee in
1866 to terrorize blacks. Klansmen, who wore white hoods to conceal their identities, harassed and
beat blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags, and sometimes even conducted lynchings—mob killings of
blacks, usually by hanging. The Klan often used these tactics to scare blacks away from the polls
during elections and to punish those who did not obey their demands. In one extreme case, Klansmen
murdered several hundred black voters in Louisiana in 1868.

c) Plessy vs. Ferguson

The Supreme Court's messy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 was a major setback for early civil rights
activists. The decision declared that segregated public and private facilities for blacks and whites were
"separate but equal," effectively justifying Jim Crow segregation laws. The single justice who opposed
the decision astutely remarked that the Plessy v. Ferguson decision would set back African Americans'
struggle for equality by decades. Just as significant, the Court also upheld the right of southern
legislatures to levy poll taxes and give literacy tests—strategies that were meant to exclude blacks from
voting. These decisions effectively legalized and spread racism throughout the North and South.

4. Montgomery Bus Boycott

The initial phase of the black protest activity in the post-Brown period began on December 1, 1955. Rosa
Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white bus rider' thereby defying a
southern custom that required blacks to give seats toward the front of buses to whites. When she was
jailed, a black community boycott of the city's buses began. The boycott lasted more than a year,
demonstrating the unity and determination of black residents and inspiring blacks elsewhere.

5. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) 1957

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was created on January 10-11, 1957, when sixty
black ministers and civil rights leaders met in Atlanta, Georgia in an effort to replicate the successful
strategy and tactics of the recently concluded Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. was chosen as the first president of this new group dedicated to abolishing legalized segregation
and ending the disfranchisement of black southerners in a non-violent manner. Later SCLC would
address the issues of war and poverty.

6. Students Non-Violent Coordination Committee 1960

On February 1, 1960, four freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College began a wave
of Student sit-ins designed to end segregation at southern lunch counters. These protests spread rapidly
throughout the South and led to the founding in April 1960, of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC). This student-led group, even more aggressive in its use of nonviolent direct action
tactics than King's SCLC, stressed the development of autonomous local movements in contrast to SCLCs
strategy of using local campaigns to achieve national civil rights reforms.
 7. Freedom summer
Freedom Summer, also known as the Freedom Summer Project or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a
volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-
American voters as possible in Mississippi.

8. Birmingham Campaign
The SCLC protest strategy achieved its first major Success in 1963 when the group launched a major
campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Highly publicized confrontations between non-violent protesters,
including schoolchildren, on the one hand, and police with clubs, fire hoses, and police dogs, on the
other, gained northern sympathy.

9. Washington March
The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when some
250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Also known as the March
on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event aimed to draw attention to continuing challenges and
inequalities faced by African Americans a century after emancipation. It was also the occasion of Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s now-iconic “I Have A Dream” speech.

10. Selma to Montgomery March

On 25 March 1965, Martin Luther King led thousands of nonviolent demonstrators to the steps of the
capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, after a 5-day, 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, where local African
Americans, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) had been campaigning for voting rights.

11. The Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, aimed to overcome legal
barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote
as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Voting Rights Act is considered
one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S.

12. King’s Assassination

During the time of heightened black militancy, Martin Luther King Jr. had continued to racial equality in
the South through nonviolent means. In April 1968, however, King and killed with a high-powered rifle
while making a speech from a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. After months of searching, police
finally apprehended a young high school dropout named James Earl Ray, who had been seen running
away from the commotion at the time of the assassination. Although Ray initially admitted to killing
King, he later professed his and claimed that another unnamed man had fired the shot. A congressional
hearing ten years later found that it was likely others had been involved in the assassination plot, but
investigators made no further arrests.

13. Conclusion
The African-American civil rights movement, like similar movements earlier, had transformed American
democracy. It also served as a model for other group advancement and pride efforts involving women,
students, Chicanos, gays and lesbians, the elderly, and many others, Continuing controversies regarding
affirmative action programmes ' and remedies for historically rooted patterns of discrimination were
aspects of more fundamental, ongoing debates about the boundaries Of individual freedom, the role of
government and alternative concepts of social justice. David Swinton sums up the problem economic
Progress for Black Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era" in the following words;

“Civil rights strategy focused on the development of laws and programs to eliminate discrimination,
the basic decision in these policies was to ignore differences in wealth and ownership. This strategy
contains the assumption that individual black initiative is sufficient to eliminate racial inequality
within reasonable period of time.”