Why Did The Civil Rights Movement Start

Question 1: What is the Civil Rights Movement?

The Civil Rights Movement was a social movement in the United States. It started in 1954 and ended in 1968. Its purpose was to end segregation and to give minorities equal rights. The movement was headed by activists such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Ruby Bridges, Rosa Parks, etc. These activists believed in nonviolent protest and civil disobedience—the refusal to comply with certain laws as a peaceful form of political protest—to achieve their goal of equality for all. That is what the Civil Rights Movement was.

Question 2: How did the movement start?

The start of the Civil Rights movement is a hotly debated topic. Most historians agree that the Civil Rights movement

The main thing they were fighting for was equal rights. The way that they wanted to achieve this was by ending segregation. Segregation is a system in which people are seperated from others by race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc. Because of the color of their skin, Blacks weren’t allowed to be in certain places. Even though Plessy V. Ferguson stated that segregation was legal as long as it was equal, the places for African Americans were usually not as good as the places for white people. For example, in education, the schools for whites were usually filled with the newest textbooks, desks, and classrooms, while the Black “schools” were usually shacks with handed down textbooks, and underqualified teachers. This had an effect on the children's futures, which caused them to not be as successful as the white students. That is what civil rights activists were fighting

The first achievement was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Brown v. Board). Brown v. Board was a Supreme Court Decision in 1954. The court case ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional and overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the court case which legalized segregation. Another achievement, and perhaps the most important, was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. This means that you could no longer discriminate against others in public accommodations—facilities, whether publicly or privately owned, that are used by the public at large. Essentially, any place you could congregate, you couldn’t segregate. The third achievement was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended poll taxes and literacy tests, which were meant to prevent Blacks from voting. The last achievement of the Civil Rights Movement was the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which ended redlining-the process of refusing something (typically a loan or insurance) to someone (minorities) because they live in an area deemed to be a poor financial risk. Those are the four main accomplishments of the Civil Rights