The Civil Rights Movement
Introduction
The African-American civil rights movement was one of the most significant periods in the history of America. The aim of the movement was to offer the African American populace the same rights of citizenship as other white Americans. It was a war that waged on a number of fronts. During the 1960, the movement attained legislative and judicial victories against prejudice in voting and accommodation amongst the black people (Shelton and Raúl 21). It brought a substantial achievement in fighting against discrimination of housing and jobs. The Africans who were in a position to benefit from the new legislature were the doctors, lawyers, teachers and some middle-class African-Americans, who formed the models for the black populace. However, the civil rights movement did not succeed in eliminating broken families, crime, drugs and poverty (Shelton and Raúl 28). For some African-Americans, the civil rights movement brought an achievement in education and employment and better opportunities in the professions in entertainment, military and sports.
In 1950, the African-Americans started to enroll in colleges, and this made their enrolment rise to approximately 2500 percent from 1940. The first male African-American in Hollywood to win an Academy award in America was Sydney Poitier. He got an award for best actor. Another female African-American to win an Academy was Gwendolyn Brooks, who won in the category of poetry. Hulan Jack won the seat for the president of Borough of Manhattan. The first black to be appointed as a general of the air force was Benjamin Davis, Jr. (Freedman 34). However, these people represented just a small fraction of the African-Americans. The rest of the black population toiled in poor housing, schooling, lack of jobs, and poverty. Their condition were worsened by the fact that the media adverts continued to remind them of the how affluent other people were in the American society (Freedman 36).
Amongst all the discrimination forms in the US, the separation of races in colleges and public institutions was the most common. Facilities used in the black institutions were in poor conditions compared to those used in the white institutions. The 14th Amendment tried to offer the citizens equal law protection. In 1890s, the supreme courts of the United States had come up with a segregated but equal phrase (Bowers and Eva 121). The court made a ruling for separate races only on the condition that they would be the same in quality, as per the 14th Amendment. The segregated but equal phrase was meant for accommodations of the railroad.
In 1954, the Supreme Court managed to knockdown racial barriers in the Brown v. Board of Education. The suite involved several school systems from Washington, Kansas and Topeka. Chief Justice Earl Warren affirmed that the segregation was intrinsically uneven. In 1955, the Supreme Court ordered 17 states to create arrangements for doing away with separation. In 1957, the federal country declared that Black students would study in the Central High School, Arkansas. This occurred in September of the next year, before the situation came to a resolution, and the schools were opened.
In the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in a front seat in the bus. This occurred eleven months after she was arraigned in the Supreme Court to declare the unconstitutionality of the Alabama separation (Bowers and Eva 125). The greatest accomplishment of for the African-American civil rights movement occurred in times of Martin Luther King, Jr. If it were not for this man, the civil rights movement would not have happened.
Works Cited
Bowers, Rick, and Eva Absher. Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network That
Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement. Washington, D.C: National Geographic,
2010. Print.
Freedman, Russell. The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for
Equal Rights. New York: Clarion Books, 2004. Print.
Shelton, Paula Y, and Raúl Colón. Child of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Schwartz &
Wade Books, 2010. Print.
