During the 1960s, there were many protests for equality and the ending of segregation. “On February 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, went to the local Woolworth’s department store and sat at an area that was reserved for whites” (Foner, 972). They continued to protest and a few whites joined them. Due to this, “Demonstrations spread across the country” (Foner, 972) and the four students became the leading force for social change. However, the protests led to many blacks getting beaten. In 1963, “Birmingham was a violent city-there had been over fifty bombings of black homes and institutions since World War II” (Foner, 975). Black people here, had to deal with many dreadful events. At this time, Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to Birmingham and he had wrote the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a response to the “abuses faced by black southerners” (Foner, …show more content…
After Martin Luther’s actions of helping, on August 28, 1963, 250,000 black and white Americans converged on the nation’s capital for the March on Washington, often considered the high point of nonviolent civil rights movement” (Foner, 976). This displays that something was working because blacks and whites came together for a variety of reasons, such as, reducing unemployment, an increase in the minimum wage, and a law barring discrimination in employment. There were also “Violent outbreaks in black ghettos outside the South drew attention to the national scope of racial injustice and to inequalities in jobs, educations, and housing that the dismantling of legal segregation left intact” (Foner, 989). In the ghettos, there was violence and the outbreaks led to negative outcomes. Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Chicago Freedom Movement, that fought for an end to discrimination, equal access to mortgages, the integration of public housing, and the construction of low-income housing scattered throughout the