Civil Rights Movement Dbq Essay

Throughout history the black community has faced many forms of racial inequality, more intensely in the South. There were two forms of segregation, segregation enforced by laws such as the separation of schools and the Jim Crow Laws, and segregation that was implied such as an African American giving up their seat on the bus or moving off the sidewalk if a white civilian walks by. By the late 1950s the Civil Rights Movement began to rise. The beginning of the Civil Rights Movement was in 1955 when Emmett Till was murdered. His mother Mamie Till refused to have a closed casket funeral, she wanted the people to see what they did to her son. Mamie Tills defiance sparked other African Americans to fight for their rights. Some began to protest

Before Martin Luther King Jr. died his idea of nonviolent protest were being questioned. Huey Newton wrote “What good however, was nonvoilence when police were determined to rule by force? . . . We recognized that the rising consciousness of Black people was almost at the point of explosion.”(Document 1) This statement was a result of the attack on the Watts community by the police. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to talk to the people of the community and enforce the idea of nonviolence, but it did not work. This attack sparked the Watts riots in 1965. In 1966 at the civil rights march in Chicago people began to throw bricks and bottles. The marchers caught them and threw them back. This act indicted that nonviolence was not going to work in the North anymore. When Dr. King was leading the protests in Chicago some whites and blacks were working together to fight for equality. Later that year the split between blacks and whites was getting larger. Bob Lucas, the president of the Chicago Congress of Racial Equality, states “But after he left, it really began to manifest itself to the point where blacks literally asked whites to leave the movement and to leave the meetings.”(Document 2)They kept the peace for a long as Dr. King was their out of respect, but when he left it changed. This played continued after Kings assassination in 1968 along with the theme of violent

Police brutality was a major challenge. Many faced discrimination when in the court, in the street, and in the enforcement of the law. Police attacks were the sparks for some riots. The Federal Poverty Program began to give hope to the poor blacks and whites of america according to King. During the Vietnam war the program was forgotten in the shadow of the war. Not only did the war take away the program it caused many to fight for the country that discriminated them. Martin Luther KIng Jr. states “So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill together and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.”(Document 5) Not only were they fighting for a country that deemed them not equal, the nation developed COINTELPRO. The programs purpose was to “[prevent] the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.”(Document 7) They believed that the growth of civil rights groups and ideas threatened national security. They targeted the of the movement , Dr. King and the Black Panthers, in hopes that if they were brought down the movement would die down along with them. Many challenges were faced by the African Americans during their fight for civil rights, but they still continued fighting for