How To Write An Essay About The Civil Rights Movement

1422 Words6 Pages

Clyde Farmer
Civil Rights Essay

The Civil Rights Movement started in the 1950s and gained steam during the 1960s with the help of activist and those wanting a better future for themselves, their people, and their country. The Civil Rights Movement features prominent social activist and regular citizens doing civil disobedience for awareness and protest to show their discontent with the way blacks are treated within the United States. There were also governmental changes that help forward the movement and propel the future. The laws, people and events helped put the United States onto a path towards equality and a reason to rethink its own definition of “freedom” in the Unites States.
The fight for Civil Rights started after Reconstruction, …show more content…

This separation of the two races continued until 1954, when the United States Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a bundle of five separate cases put together, ruled that segregation within public schools was unconstitutional. This Supreme Court ruling from the new chief justice Earl Warren reversed the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which allowed state sponsored segregation as long as the facilities were “separate but equal”. Though the Supreme Court ruling was a cause for celebration and hope for the start of racial equality, they delayed the implementation in order to devise a plan for the dismantling of segregated schools. This was not the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Two years after the ruling there was a document called the Southern Manifesto (1956); which was signed by 101 southern members of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The writers of the document state that the Supreme Court ruling is abusing its power and that the constitution does not mention education nor does the 14th amendment. They use the Plessy v. Ferguson case as an example