Martin Luther King Jr.

4 Pages 1020 Words

The Black Civil Rights movement in the 1950's and 60's was a political, legal and social struggle of the black Americans to gain full citizenship rights and to achieve racial equality. The black struggle for Civil Rights was very hard. No group in America has or has had more difficulty assimilating into the American Culture. Segregation was started by white American southerners to separate everything between the blacks and the whites. It was also knows as the "Jim Crow" system and became common to the southern. Everything possible was separated between the blacks and the whites; schools, toilet, transportation, restaurants were all separated, the blacks were poorly funded compared to the whites (Branch 72).



The black people tried to fight discrimination against them whenever possible. The most significant one during the early 50's was the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama led by Martin Luther King. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was told to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person (Hampton 13). When she refuses, she was arrested which caused protest by the black community. Martin Luther King at that time was president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the protest. These activities included marches, demonstrations, and boycotts. The violent white response to black direct action eventually forced the federal government to confront the issues of injustice and racism in the South. It made him a national figure for fighting the rights of the Black Americans.



Civil rights proved to be the crucial test of the l960s. Leadership came from black political and religious organizations such as the Congress on Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Council Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and other forms of nonviolent protest became the weapons to fight segregation. Over 200,000 men and women joined a freedom march all over America...