What Was The Role Of The Civil Rights Movement In The 1930s And 1940s

For fifty years, scholars have debated the importance of the political, legal, and social actions that occurred during the 1930s and 1940s. The debate centers on whether these actions contributed to the overall success of the civil rights movement. The dominant narrative presented by scholars asserts the actual significant period of the movement occurred with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ended following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Their reasoning for this assertion, the non-violent protest movements of boycotts, sit-ins, and marches occurring from the mid-to-late 50s and early 60s resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The passage of these Acts corrected the wrongs created by the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which ended the influence of Jim Crow Laws and segregation in the South. Since the dominant narrative focuses primarily on the 1960s for the successes achieved by the movement, is there enough historiographical analysis supporting

Throughout his narrative, he discusses the differing interpretation of historians in their study of this movement. Fairclough main focus centers on three differing stages of the movement: the early beginnings in the 1930s and 1940s, the effects of the early Cold War years and the anticommunist movement, and the effects of the non-violent protest movements of the 1950s and