Essay On The Civil Rights Movement

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On December 1st, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to give up her seat in the front of a bus to a white man. It was this act of defiance that most people argue began the Civil Rights movement. The movement began in 1954/1955 and lasted throughout the 1960’s. Following the arrest of Rosa Parks, African Americans in Montgomery began boycotting the bus system.This boycott was one of the first major stands against racism in the 1950’s. The movement lasted from 1954 to 1968, it was not until the 1960’s that other minority groups such as Native Americans and women began to join in the fight. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was possibly the most important domestic social movement of the twentieth …show more content…

Board of Education of Topeka was a trivial Supreme Court case in the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement.It started when Linda Brown an elementary age African American student in Topeka,Kansas requested to attend the local all-white school in her neighborhood, rather than an all-black school that was further away. The case began in 1951 when Oliver Brown, Linda’s father, sued the Topeka, Kansas Board of Education. He was suing to allow his 8-year-old daughter Linda to attend a school that only white children were allowed to attend. After numerous appeals, the case reached the Supreme Court. The monumental Plessy vs. Ferguson verdict of 1896 stated “separate but equal” racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal (History.com). Schools were public conveniences, and Linda Brown was therefore rejected from attending. When the case reached the Supreme Court the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) became involved. On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court made its most significant ruling. By overturning Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court declared that in the area of public schooling "the doctrine of separate but equal had no place." The case ruled that segregation was unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court ordered that school integration go forward "with all deliberate

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