Speech concerning Civil Rights Movement overview, no date

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1 Imagine being unable to eat or sleep in most restaurants or motels and hotels; being unable to sit where you wanted in a movie theatre; having to sit in the rear when you boarded a bus, even an empty one; being forced to attend an inferior school; and even being forbidden to drink from certain water fountains.

These were the facts of everyday life for all Black people in the Southern part of the United States as recently as 1960. They were citizens of a country founded on the principle that all men are created equal. Yet, they were treated unequally and declared unequal - by law.

In the middle 1950's, a movement of ordinary women and men arose to challenge this way of life. Using boycotts, marches, and other forms of protest, they ultimately forced the South to end its peculiar system of legalized segregation. They succeeded because, in a democracy, when the people speak, the government must listen.

The events which shaped the modern civil rights movement began on May 15, 1954, when the United States Supreme Court

Last edit 12 months ago by shashathree
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-2outlawed segregation in public schools and ended on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis.

Just as the death of the movement's most famous leader did not mark the end of the struggle for racial equality, however, the story -- and the struggle -- begin much earlier.

The first Europeans who arrived in the New Land murdered and enslaved the peaceful Indians who greated them, and in 1619, the first shipment of 20 slaves from Africa arrived on American shores.

For the next 250 years, the institution of slavery flourished. As slavery grew, so did deep seated feelings of racial superiority adoped by whites to justify owning their fellow men and women. Southern whites insisted Blacks were inferior human beings who were destined to be slaves.

The harshness of the slave system lead to some revolts and many escapes; a brutal system of punishments helped to keep the slave in his place.

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-3The Civil War ended the legality of slavery, but the restrictive system continued through custom and a series of laws designed to keep Black American slaves in all but name.

In the years after the Civil War, the United States Congress allowed the white South to keep Blacks subservient, to deprive Blacks of civil rights, and to deny Blacks the right to vote through terror and repressive law. The United States Supreme Court permitted the establishment of racial rule in the South, and most Americans - - even those who believed in racial equality -- disapproved of the use of aggressive tactics to end southern segregation.

But just as slaves had revolted against being someone else's property, the newly freed Blacks revolted peacefully against being kept voteless, landless, and excluded from the American Dream.

When their efforts were thwarted by violence, Congress, and the courts, they kept alive the hope that conditions would improve. Gradually a clear distinction was drawn between racial

Last edit 12 months ago by shashathree
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-4conditions, North and South. Fueled by the dream of better life, southern Blacks migrated North in record numbers between 1890 and 1920 and began to establish political power which helped to ease racial restrictions north of Mason-Dixon Line.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded by Blacks and whites in 1909, began a legal campaign against racism's restrictions on Blacks. The NAACP won some victories; but the white South resisted, and total separation of the races in the South continued.

The North offered no real escape from racism - poverty, unequal education, and discrimination flourished there as well. But those southern Blacks who traveled north found an escape from permanent enslavement by farming white-owned land for little or no pay. In the North, they found improved public education and access to jobs far superior to those they had left behind.

Meanwhile, brutal retaliation met anyone in the South who threatened to break the color line. More and more, the rigid walls of segregation were confined to the southern states alone.

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- 5 - Black Americans found an ally in the New Deal promoted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940s. The horrors of the Nazi regime in Germany made racism less defensible, and the Supreme Court began to recognize Black rights to freedoms whites already enjoyed.

While conditions in the South for Blacks did not change, the racial climate nationally did shift. More Blacks moved North, and the domestic war effort saw racial restrictions eased in labor unions and in employment.

The protests against segregation continued during the war years, in spite of efforts to quiet all domestic disagreements while the war overseas went on.

The promise that equality would extend to all Americans did dampen some aggressive anti-racist efforts until the war's end but also served to increase anticipation among Blacks of greater freedoms in the future.

By the war's end, some progress had been recorded, but the status of most Blacks in the South remained the same. At the

Last edit 12 months ago by shashathree
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