The civil rights movement lasted for years and it lifted the blanket off the hidden unequal and unjust divide between African Americans and the whites in the 1950s and 60s. African Americans faced discrimination and segregation everyday throughout the 1950s, whether it was yelling curse words at African Americans from the other side of the road, or to beating them in the street. There was no restriction, no limits to what was done. Segregation had been taunting them for centuries and they had finally said “No”. This came in the form of violent and non-violent protests, which caused outrage and backlash from white people. These were led by people like Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Park and Malcolm X who are now considered civil rights heroes. The idea behind the non-violent protests was to get the attention of other groups of people by showing the amounts of violence that the African Americans suffered and to get the attention of higher powers like the President and the army. An example of a non-violent protest was the “Freedom rides”. This was where seven African Americans and six whites left Washington, D.C., on two public buses headed for the Deep South. They intended to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail …show more content…
The segregation spread into schools, churches, restaurants and public venues. An example of the severity that the African Americans faced can be shown through the Greensboro Sit-in. The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when four young African-American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. The four African Americans had contacted the media beforehand so that what they would be protesting nationally as