The Effectiveness Of The Civil Rights Movement During The 1900's

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The Civil Rights movement during the 1900’s was an extremely important period in human history, as it was a fight for basic human rights against racial discrimination across America. Civil Rights activists used several modes of non-violent protest in advancing the rights and freedoms of African Americans, such as marches, boycotts, and direct action. Some methods were eventually successful in spreading these issues to the public, changing the discriminative laws and defacing segregation in America, but most methods only had somewhat effectiveness in getting rid of the general, pre-existing racist attitudes in the long term of the modern world. Freedom Marches were an effective method of the Civil Rights Movement, successfully prompting government …show more content…

In response to the demands of the marches, there was passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 which allegedly outlawed discrimination in public places. However, racial discrimination still continued despite the change in law, white supremacists even increasing their actions against the CRM after the march/movement. The Washington March of 1963 was one of the several marches that had significantly impacted the nation’s views on rights and discrimination. The whole march was televised live to America, successfully gaining immediate national media coverage on the issue. From there, the aspirations of equal rights were communicated to the general public, other oppressed individuals, and even the Kennedy government. Three months later, President Kennedy sent a civil rights bill to Congress, and it would become the most well known act of legislation supporting racial equality in American history, the method demonstrating significant success in gaining government influence. The law change, however, barely impacted public opinion on the Civil Rights Movement. In source A, it's evident that 58% of Americans were supportive towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and although there was a slight improvement in advocation, the difference …show more content…

Direct action involved the non-violent method of testing the boundaries of segregational laws mostly in public areas. These methods were much more upfront than previous methods, and albeit successfully impairing the flaws in integration laws. But despite the present desegregation in public areas reflecting the CRM’s eventual success, the impact of direct action did not have an immediate effect and even had some deterioration in the progress for equal rights for quite some time before improving. An example of direct action was the freedom riders in 1947, where advocates of the CRM in South America exercised their constitutional rights against segregation by riding the buses together as a mix of white and black passengers. The freedom riders’ actions proved the court ruling of the 14th Amendment to be insubstantial, receiving threats, unnecessary arrests, and even attacks such as beatings and molotov cocktails wherever the freedom riders went from white citizens and even government officials. The freedom riders faced a severe amount of backlash and violence despite the unconstitutional ruling of segregation, and although there wasn’t an immediately successful improvement in the

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