1960s Dbq Essay

During the 1960’s, the Civil Rights Movement was a big topic and controversy with all of the United States. It was quite clear that African Americans did not get treated the same way that whites did. It had been ruled that it was constitutional to be “separate but equal”, but African Americans always had less than the whites did. For example, the schools that they had were run down, and had very little classrooms, books, and buses. Martin Luther King had a large role in the Civil Rights Movement, as did Malcolm X, and others. There were many changes that occurred in the 1960’s in specifically in the goals, strategies, and support of the movement for African American civil rights. While the movement started as peaceful, as the years went along,

They believed that “love transforms hate”, and that “peace dominates war” (Document A). They participated in events such as the March on Washington, and the Montgomery March. Many Africans received beatings from police officers and from their fellow white citizens, but they continued to be peaceful and not react in violence. The Black Panthers were also an originally peaceful group, that later turned to violence. Stokely Carmichael, the leader of the Black Panthers said that he wanted “[the] humanistic love [to] prevail” (Document E). On May 2, 1967, Huey P. Newton, the minister of defense of the Black Panthers, said that “the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late” (Document F). The group had changed to a violent point of view after they saw nothing was happening when they were

Originally, African Americans had to be segregated and weren’t even allowed to vote. In 1965 after the Montgomery March, Lyndon B Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act, and later in 1968 both the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and the Fourteenth Amendment were passed. The Fourteenth Amendmendment said that “all persons born of naturalized in the United States” could legally vote. These acts got rid of literacy tests, and in 1968, when Nixon became president (Document H), there was over two times the amount of African American voters than there was in 1960 (Document G). African Americans also gained large support from a president, John F. Kennedy, which wasn’t something anyone had expected looking back at how past presidents acted. Kennedy said that “race has no place in American life or law” (Document D), which means that he believed there was no room in the US for racial