How Did African Americans Support Civil Rights

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As Dr. Martin Luther King stated in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail," African Americans "waited for more than 340 years for . . . constitutional and God given rights." African Americans did not get civil rights nor were they considered American citizens even after the Civil War. Equality for African Americans did not get put into place after the Civil War because of Lincoln’s assassination, nobody after him would necessarily support civil rights because they either didn’t support it, or they didn’t want to show they supported it because they would have had a chance of losing office. The South also depended heavily on slave trade; most southerners didn’t just give up their slaves they had already “owned”. The Ku Klux Klan Act was an act