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To understand
the vague historical facts of the civil rights movement
one must first understand what the American government
calls civil rights!
A civil right is an enforceable right or privilege,
which if interfered with by another gives rise to an
action for injury. Examples of civil rights are freedom
of speech, press, assembly, the right to vote, freedom
from involuntary servitude, and the right to equality
in public places. Discrimination occurs when the civil
rights of an individual are denied or interfered with
because of their membership in a particular group or
class. Statutes have been enacted to prevent discrimination
(So they say) based on a person’s race, sex, religion,
age, and previous condition of servitude, physical limitation,
and national origin. |
From slavery
to the civil rights movement, black men being too assertive
in the public sphere was a breach of 'social order'
established by white society.
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But before
there were given civil rights, blacks had no rights.
Blacks had to fight. And the rights that black have
now are they right? Let’s journey back a couple
of decades when our people had to fight just to be considered
a human being instead of 3/5 human. This is the civil
rights movement!
During World War II, progress was made in outlawing
discrimination in defense industries, and after the
war in desegregating the armed forces. During the late
1940s and early 1950s, lawyers for the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pressed
a series of important cases before the Supreme Court
in which they argued that segregation meant inherently
unequal (and inadequate) educational and other public
facilities for blacks.
These cases culminated in the Court's landmark decision
in Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954), in which
it declared that separate educational facilities were
inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. This
historic decision was to stimulate a mass movement on
the part of blacks and white sympathizers to try to
end the segregationist practices and racial inequalities
that were firmly entrenched across the nation and particularly
in the South. The movement was strongly resisted by
many whites in the South and elsewhere.
Rosa Parks, often portrayed as a simple seamstress,
who exhausted after a long day at work, refused to give
up her seat to a white person. While this is not untrue,
there is more to the story. Parks was educated; she
had attended the laboratory school at Alabama State
College because there was no high school for blacks
in Montgomery at that time, but had decided to become
a seamstress because she could not find a job to suit
her skills. She was also a long-time NAACP worker who
had taken a special interest in Claudette Colvin's case.
When she was arrested in December 1955, she had recently
completed a workshop on race relations at the Highlander
Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. And she was a well-respected
woman with a spotless record.
On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a
city bus and sat with three other blacks in the fifth
row, the first row that blacks could occupy. A few stops
later, the front four rows were filled with whites,
and one white man was left standing. According to law,
blacks and whites could not occupy the same row, so
the bus driver asked all four of the blacks seated in
the fifth row to move. Three complied, but Parks refused.
She was arrested for refusing to move to the Negro section
of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. (Dec. 1, 1955). Blacks
staged a one-day local boycott of the bus system to
protest her arrest.
Fusing these protest elements with the historic force
of the Negro churches, a local Baptist minister, Martin
Luther King, Jr., succeeded in transforming a spontaneous
racial protest into a massive resistance movement. After
a boycott of the Montgomery Bus Company forced it to
desegregate its facilities, picketing and boycotting
spread rapidly to other communities. During the period
from 1955 to 1960, some progress was made toward integrating
schools and other public facilities in the upper South
and the Border States, but the Deep South remained adamant
in its opposition to most desegregation measures.
Up until 1966 the Civil Rights Movement had united widely
disparate elements in the black community along with
their white supporters and sympathizers, but in that
year signs of radicalism began to appear in the movement
as younger blacks became impatient with the rate of
change and dissatisfied with purely nonviolent methods
of protest. This new militancy split the ranks of the
movement's leaders and also alienated some white sympathizers,
a process that was accelerated by a wave of rioting
in the black ghettos of several major cities.
(End)
Next Page: Judah in the 21st Century
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Who Is there among you of all his people?
His God be with him, and let him go up to
Jerusalem which is in Judah, and build the
house of YHWH Elohim
of Israel (he is the God) which is in Jerusalem."
(Ezra 1:1-3) |
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Rosa L. Parks
1913–2005,
American civil-rights activist, b. Tuskegee, Alabama. |
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Martin Luther King,
Jr.
Speaks to a crowd
of marchers in Washington, DC |
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