Author name:
مريم عبد علي حمدان الساعدي
Supervisor name:
علي محمد كريم المشهداني
Abstract:
This thesis describes the significant events of the Civil Rights Movement from1953 - 1968 in the United States essentially began the same time that the country did. Beginning with the Abolitionist movement to end the “peculiar institution” of slavery, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and into the Industrial Age, the United States has always grappled with the problem of race, wars and manifested itself in other forms. There were many valiant attempts during the Twentieth Century to improve the state of race relations, but all of them were doomed to minimal success. In the 1950s, a series of several victories in the courts engineered by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision seemed to open the floodgates for change The case, which struck down the 1896 precedent of “separate but equal”, established in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson marked the beginning of the erosion of entrenched systematized segregation. This decision was really the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement, marked with effective protest and actual results. There would have been no Civil Rights Movement.” The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 - 56 was one of the earliest events in the modern Civil Rights Movement. Under the leadership of MIA (Montgomery Improvement Association) President Martin Luther King Jr. Blacks used the nonviolent resistance technique of a mass boycott on the city bus system. After a protracted campaign, the Montgomery Improvement Association forced the end of segregation on public transit in the city. King, who was quite interested in social justice and equality, saw that he had the model for bringing about the end of Jim Crow in the South. Meanwhile in Little Rock, tensions were building in 1957 as Arkansas attempted to comply with the Brown decision. That fall, as the plan of integration was being carried out, violence erupted. President Eisenhower was forced to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and call in regular US Army troops to allow nine teenage children the right to attend school, lessons of Montgomery and Little Rock and use nonviolent resistance tactics to educate the nation to the racial injustice that was rampant in the South.The years from 1960 to 1965 were the high mark of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Under the leadership of Dr. King’s organization, SCLC, the Movement managed to change the nation.In 1962 in Albany, Georgia, SCLC and SNCC attempted to wage the first large scale campaign to secure integration of public facilities and voting rights in the city. The Albany Sheriff knew what the campaign was designed to do, provoke him and his men into violence, thus Prichett used nonviolence to combat nonviolence, therefore, stymieing the efforts of King and his supporters. King knew that in the wake of failure at Albany, the Movement needed to do something profound in 1963. Little could he have dreamed that it was the events of that year that would result in Congress passing the following year meaningful civil rights legislation for the first time since Reconstruction. In 1963, SCLC decided to implement a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Here they met their desired result, as police chief Bull Connor reacted in the manner SCLC anticipated. The mass arrests of protesters were accompanied by the use of fire hoses and police dogs, and the nation watched the coverage on television, stunned. Violence got so bad that President Kennedy was forced to station troops in various parts of the state to be used if the situation did not calm down. By the summer of 1963, with Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill on the floor of Congress, civil rights organizations staged the March on Washington to apply pressure to the government. With 250,000 marchers standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King gave his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. That September, tragedy once again occurred in Birmingham, as a bomb killed four Black girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Violence erupted, and by the end of the day six people were dead. In November 1963 John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and Lyndon Johnson became President. Johnson’s legislative skills aided in passing Kennedy’s bill, and in 1964, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.5 On the heels of a victory in Birmingham, King’s next focus was voting rights. While launching the statewide Alabama Project, SCLC decided to stage a campaign in Selma.Alabama. Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark harbored many of the racist values of Bull Connor, and once again SCLC planned on exposing the violence of the police to demonstrate the evils of Jim Crow. In this campaign, the movement was emphasizing the injustice of being deprived of the right to vote. The campaign went smoothly until March 7, 1965. While beginning a planned march to the state capital, the marchers were routed by police with tear gas, cattle prods, and billy clubs. “Bloody Sunday” was the turning point. The march went on, and as President Johnson was forced to get involved, he decided that the time was now right to force a voting rights bill through Congress. His Administration had been stalling on sending more civil rights legislation to Congress, but Johnson decided that King had given him a perfect opportunity to pass a voting rights bill. The President turned out to be correct, and on August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. 1966 saw waves of protests at universities across the country.however, the civil rights movement has focused on the achievement of equal rights for African - Americans through the end of legal segregation and achieve voting rights. The movement against less focused and tangled war closely with the counterculture, and show their opposition to the Vietnam War as part of a wider movement range to convert the country.King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Riots broke out in more than 110 cities across the United States in the days thatfollowed, notably in Chicago, Baltimore, and in Washington, D.C. The damage done in many cities destroyed black businesses. The day before King's funeral, April 8, Coretta Scott King and three of the King children led 20,000 marchers through the streets of Memphis, holding signs that read, "Honor King : End Racism" and "Union Justice Now. On April 9 Mrs. King led another 150,000 in a funeral procession through the streets of Atlanta ;The African - American Civil Rights Movement 1953 - 1968 refers to the social movements in the United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against black Americans and restoring. rights to them.
