Civil Rights

Civil Rights

Question #2
After WWII, segregation divided the people of the United States. African Americans were refused jobs, services at restaurants, and access to adequate housing. They returned from the front with renewed determination to fight for civil rights for all Americans. Although the common ideal was to remain peaceful, some methods of change and resistance proved to be violent, leading to some of the worst urban riots in U.S. history. Blacks demonstrated the fact that they would go to any extent to be entitled to equal rights. African Americans organized groups and staged public demonstrations to share their ideas to the rest of the nation while peacefully refusing to obey unjust laws, advancing the civil rights movement to an ultimate success.
Organization is most important to the success of a movement, and Civil Rights activists successfully demonstrated this by forming groups with like ideals to fight together for what they wanted. The formation of these groups and committees allowed activists to share their ideas and adopt new ones on common topics. These groups would then stage demonstrations to prove to the other half of the nation that they were a strong force. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) used African American churches and carried out nonviolent protests in the South. Different branches of the SCLC were set up in different Southern cities, all under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. African American college students at Shaw University came together to form the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) which later became one of the most influential student activist movements in history. The SNCC illustrated the views of college students, and how the pace of the movement as a whole was moving too slow. The SNCC organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in order for African Americans to gain a seat in Mississippi’s all-white Democratic Party. The Black Panthers was another political group that...

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