Mitchell Brown
History 1220-003
9 May 2013
During the civil rights movement, African Americans took matters in to their own hands and forced officials in Washington to act in their behalf. African Americans stood up to the segregation and Jim Crow Laws and decided to make themselves equal to whites. They staged boycotts and riots to show people they meant business. Events held by African Americans and civil rights activists included the bus boycotts; sit ins, freedom rides, the March on Washington, and the Freedom Summer. In the end, their fight helped end segregation. But, even with the end of segregation, some people were not happy about it.
The first event that occurred during the civil rights movement was the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka case. In this case, the court rejected its own Plessy vs. Ferguson case which “had ruled that communities could provide African Americans with separate facilities as long as the facilities were equal to those of Whites.” (The Unfinished Nation, 475) In the Brown decision, they declared that segregation because of race was unconstitutional. By the new school year of 1957, 640 of 3,000 segregated schools had begun to become desegregated. It was not much, but it was definitely a start to something much bigger.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat in the front of a bus to a white passenger. Blacks belonged on the back of the bus according to the Jim Crow Laws. The arrest of Rosa Parks was the beginning of an outrage of the African American community in Montgomery, Alabama. The African Americans started a boycott of the segregation of seating on public transportation. The leader of this boycott was Martin Luther King, Jr. and he promoted a nonviolence campaign. “For the next thirteen years-as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and interracial group he founded shortly after the bus boycott- he was the most influential and...