History UsefulNotes / CivilRightsMovement

Despite the gravitas of this movement, evidence of it was hardly seen in popular culture until later on in TheSixties. The mainstream media largely ignored the movements until the late 1950s, when the struggle and police violence against members of the movement began to be filmed, serving as ready-made fodder for the growing television news genre. Martin Luther King Jr. and company proved quick studies in media savvy and worked the reporters well, taking advantage of the fact that their enemies were all but threatening them. Politically, President DwightDEisenhower was infamously silent on the matter in public, though in private he supported desegregation and even authorized the use of the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation in Arkansas, a state whose governor (Orval Faubus, not George Wallace as most people think) tried to use the National Guard to prevent black students from attending white schools. Both JohnFKennedy and LyndonJohnson supported the movement, culminating in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which made illegal the "Jim Crow" trickery that kept minorities from being able to vote. UsefulNotes/HarryTruman also publicly supported equal rights for African Americans (famously saying "My forebears were Confederates... but my very stomach turned over when I had learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten."), but Congress practically ignored his proposals.

The date when the civil rights movement started is not definitive and is still debated among historians; some credit the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, a few point to FranklinDRoosevelt ending racial discrimination in the federal government, others say when HarryTruman forcibly integrated the [[YanksWithTanks US Army]] during his presidency. Most often though, two moments in the 1950s stand out as the turning points which brought the movement together as far as catalysts go. The first one was ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the controversial 1896 ''Plessy v. Fergeson'' Supreme Court ruling which legalized segregation. "Brown" was a 9-0 ruling that basically called out the utter hypocrisy of segregation by way of pointing out that "separate but equal" was essentially code for "white people get nice things, but black people get barely functioning, barely usable versions of what white people take for granted." Famously, Chief Justice Earl Warren's ruling stated "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Despite the gravitas of this movement, evidence of it was hardly seen in popular culture until later on in TheSixties. The mainstream media largely ignored the movements until the late 1950s, when the struggle and police violence against members of the movement began to be filmed, serving as ready-made fodder for the growing television news genre. Martin Luther King Jr. and company proved quick studies in media savvy and worked the reporters well, taking advantage of the fact that their enemies were all but threatening them. Politically, President DwightDEisenhower was infamously silent on the matter in public, though in private he supported desegregation and even authorized the use of the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation in Arkansas, a state whose governor (Orval Faubus, not George Wallace as most people think) tried to use the National Guard to prevent black students from attending white schools. Both JohnFKennedy and LyndonJohnson supported the movement, culminating in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which made illegal the "Jim Crow" trickery that kept minorities from being able to vote. HarrySTruman also publicly supported equal rights for African Americans (famously saying "My forebears were Confederates... but my very stomach turned over when I had learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten."), but Congress practically ignored his proposals.

* Alluded to in ''Film/BackToTheFuture'' when Marty declares that a certain black busboy will someday be mayor and the response is, "a colored mayor, that'll be the day!" Obviously, the Civil Rights Movement is what happened between 1955 and 1985 to make that possible.

[[AC:{{Film}}

* ''NaughtsAndCrosses'' depicts the Civil Rights movement, depicting both peaceful and violent acts of protest- while existing in an AlternateUniverse where it is the white (the 'naughts') discriminated against by the blacks (the 'crosses').

One of the most important events in American history, the Civil Rights Movement brought about progress towards racial equality under the law, after America largely spent the hundred years after the Civil War ignoring the fact that blacks and other minorities were still being treated like second class citizens with little to no rights in many parts of the country. The [[TheDeepSouth Southern states]], despite losing the UsefulNotes/AmericanCivilWar and the abolition of slavery (or [[WildMassGuessing possibly]] ''[[SoreLoser because]]'' [[SoreLoser of those occurrences]]), had found numerous loopholes to keep blacks down: "Jim Crow" laws were drafted following the end of reconstruction in many Southern states, while the hypocritical and inherently flawed concept of "Separate but Equal" segregation denied minorities in the South basic rights. Black people even found it difficult to vote, despite having the right to, since states could (and did) impose literacy tests (extremely difficult ones, which were often rigged by having answers that were either impossible to answer or deliberately ambiguous) and poll taxes.[[note]]If you're wondering why these didn't apply to whites, it's because the laws had exemptions for people whose fathers or grandfathers could vote at the time of the law's passage. This is where we get the term "GrandfatherClause."[[/note]]Many other groups also faced discrimination by some.

One of the most important events in American history, the Civil Rights Movement brought about progress towards racial equality under the law, after America largely spent the hundred years after the Civil War ignoring the fact that blacks and other minorities were still being treated like second class citizens with little to no rights in many parts of the country. The [[TheDeepSouth Southern states]], despite losing the UsefulNotes/AmericanCivilWar and the abolition of slavery (or [[WildMassGuessing possibly]] ''[[SoreLoser because]]'' [[SoreLoser of those occurrences]]), had found numerous loopholes to keep blacks down: "Jim Crow" laws were drafted following the end of reconstruction in many Southern states, while the hypocritical and inherently flawed concept of "Separate but Equal" segregation denied minorities in the South basic rights. Black people even found it difficult to vote, despite having the right to, since states could (and did) impose literacy tests (extremely difficult ones, which were often rigged) and poll taxes.[[note]]If you're wondering why these didn't apply to whites, it's because the laws had exemptions for people whose fathers or grandfathers could vote at the time of the law's passage. This is where we get the term "GrandfatherClause."[[/note]]Many other groups also faced discrimination by some.

One of the most important events in American history, the Civil Rights Movement brought about progress towards racial equality under the law, after America largely spent the hundred years after the Civil War ignoring the fact that blacks and other minorities were still being treated like second class citizens with little to no rights in many parts of the country. The [[TheDeepSouth Southern states]], despite losing the AmericanCivilWar and the abolition of slavery (or [[WildMassGuessing possibly]] ''[[SoreLoser because]]'' [[SoreLoser of those occurrences]]), had found numerous loopholes to keep blacks down: "Jim Crow" laws were drafted following the end of reconstruction in many Southern states, while the hypocritical and inherently flawed concept of "Separate but Equal" segregation denied minorities in the South basic rights. Black people even found it difficult to vote, despite having the right to, since states could (and did) impose literacy tests (extremely difficult ones, which were often rigged) and poll taxes.[[note]]If you're wondering why these didn't apply to whites, it's because the laws had exemptions for people whose fathers or grandfathers could vote at the time of the law's passage. This is where we get the term "GrandfatherClause."[[/note]]Many other groups also faced discrimination by some.

As of this writing, the Civil Rights Movement is still within living memory, and many of the participants on both sides are still alive. Those who were on the racist side are often, today, deeply ashamed of their former attitudes ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Massery Hazel Massery]] is one example). Others are finally being prosecuted for their crimes ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Ray_Killen Edgar Ray Killen]], one of the men who organized the mob that killed three civil rights workers in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964, was one of them). And racism still exists in many forms (beyond the overt cross-burning and men in white hoods), but these days the civil rights movement is fractured and has no clear leader.

-->''We Shall Overcome''

The date when the CivilRightsMovement started is not definitive and is still debated among historians; some credit the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, a few point to FranklinDRoosevelt ending racial discrimination in the federal government, others say when HarryTruman forcibly integrated the [[YanksWithTanks US Army]] during his presidency. Most often though, two moments in the 1950s stand out as the turning points which brought the movement together as far as catalysts go. The first one was ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the controversial 1896 ''Plessy v. Fergeson'' Supreme Court ruling which legalized segregation. "Brown" was a 9-0 ruling that basically called out the utter hypocrisy of segregation by way of pointing out that "separate but equal" was essentially code for "white people get nice things, but black people get barely functioning, barely usable versions of what white people take for granted." Famously, Chief Justice Earl Warren's ruling stated "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

* ''Film/TheButler''

!!Depictions in fiction:

In the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election, many looked at the election as the ultimate litmus test towards whether or not the civil rights movement had succeeded, as the idea of Americans having the chance to elect an African-American to the Presidency would be the ultimate way to see if the movement's successes had any impact upon the generations who came afterwards. Needless to say, BarackObama's election not only proved that the movement did indeed bring progress but also proved that there was still more work to be done.

[[caption-width-right:255:Prominent figures of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Clockwise from left: W. E. B. Du Bois, MalcolmX, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr.]]

The date when the CivilRightsMovement started is not definitive and is still debated among historians; some credit the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, others when HarryTruman forcibly integrated the [[YanksWithTanks US Army]] during his presidency. Most often though, two moments in the 1950s stand out as the turning points which brought the movement together as far as catalysts go. The first one was ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the controversial 1896 ''Plessy v. Fergeson'' Supreme Court ruling which legalized segregation. "Brown" was a 9-0 ruling that basically called out the utter hypocrisy of segregation by way of pointing out that "separate but equal" was essentially code for "white people get nice things, but black people get barely functioning, barely usable versions of what white people take for granted."

Meanwhile, the north had similar incidents, such as in 1957 when the African American family of Bill and Daisy Meyers attempted to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, one of the famed suburban projects created by William Levitt to be model communities-- for whites only, that is. Although they and their supporters wanted no trouble, their very presences revealed that there was a lot of foul bigotry in them Little Boxes made out of Ticky-Tacky. Thus, their summer was a living hell, with angry mobs, destructive riots, and systematic racist harassment, aided and abetted by indifferent local police that finally prompted the State authorities to step in to stop it. Throughout it all, the Meyers and their friends stuck it out to become heroes who impressed Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson among others; Daisy was not called "The Rosa Parks of the North" for nothing.

These acts of heroism helped inspired similar styled boycotts and "sit-ins", which preached non-violent confrontation (inspired by Gandhi's famous series of non-violent protests which helped win India its own independence) with the status quo of the south, a factor that made for a great deal of televised theater as peaceful black protesters and white sympathizers often found themselves being beaten or hosed down with fire hoses by local police departments, who thuggishly enforced the racist status quo.

However, the movement still had much to do and, by the end of the 1960s, had major problems. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and radical "[[MalcolmXerox Black Power]]" leaders and groups such as Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party, MalcolmX, Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam began to attract angry black recruits who had lost patience with King's non-violent philosophy. Unlike the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, Black Power rejected integration, feeling that white society was corrupt and decadent, and declared that black people should voluntarily segregate themselves from white society. The rise of Black Power at the end of the '60s, combined with a series of race riots in UsefulNotes/LosAngeles, [[MotorCity Detroit]] and elsewhere, ultimately provided a flawed excuse for white backlash against civil rights and led to the election of RichardNixon on a platform of "returning to normalcy". This ended up backfiring, as Nixon ended up [[PetTheDog desegregating more schools than any president before him]], and implemented the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Plan first significant federal affirmative action program.]]

As of this writing, the Civil Rights Movement is still within living memory, and many of the participants on both sides are still alive. Those who were on the racist side are often, today, deeply ashamed of their former attitudes ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Massery Hazel Massery]] is one example). Others are finally being prosecuted for their crimes ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Ray_Killen Edgar Ray Killen, one of the men who organized the mob that killed three civil rights workers in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964, was one of them]]). And racism still exists in many forms (beyond the overt cross-burning and men in white hoods), but these days the civil rights movement is fractured and has no clear leader.

As of this writing, the Civil Rights Movement is still within living memory, and many of the participants on both sides are still alive. Those who were on the racist side are often, today, deeply ashamed of their former attitudes ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Massery Hazel Massery]] is one example). Others are finally being prosecuted for their crimes (when, for example, former lynchers feel the prick of conscience and confess). And racism still exists in many forms (beyond the overt cross-burning and men in white hoods), but these days the civil rights movement is fractured and has no clear leader.

Despite the gravitas of this movement, evidence of it was hardly seen in popular culture until later on in TheSixties. The mainstream media largely ignored the movements until the late 1950s, when the struggle and police violence against members of the movement began to be filmed, serving as ready-made fodder for the growing television news genre. Martin Luther King Jr. and company proved quick studies in media savvy and worked the reporters well, taking advantage of the fact that their enemies were all but threatening them. Politically, President DwightDEisenhower was infamously silent on the matter in public, though in private he supported desegregation and even authorized the use of the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation in Arkansas, a state whose governor (Orval Faubus, not George Wallace as most people think) tried to use the National Guard to prevent black students from attending white schools. Both JohnFKennedy and LyndonJohnson supported the movement, culminating in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which made illegal the "Jim Crow" trickery that kept minorities from being able to vote.

In the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election, many looked at the election as the ultimate litmus test towards whether or not the civil rights movement had succeeded, as the idea of Americans having the chance to elected an African-American to the Presidency would be the ultimate way to see if the movement's successes had any impact upon the generations who came afterwards. Needless to say, BarackObama's election not only proved that the movement did indeed bring progress but also proved that there was still more work to be done.

However, the movement still had much to do and, by the end of the 1960s, had major problems. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and radical "[[MalcolmXerox Black Power]]" leaders and groups such as Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party, MalcolmX, Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam began to attract angry black recruits who had lost patience with King's non-violent philosophy. Unlike the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, Black Power rejected integration, feeling that white society was corrupt and decadent, and declared that black people should voluntarily segregate themselves from white society. The rise of Black Power at the end of the '60s, combined with a series of race riots in UsefulNotes/LosAngeles, [[MotorCity Detroit]] and elsewhere, ultimately provided a flawed excuse for white backlash against civil rights and led to the election of RichardNixon on a platform of "returning to normalcy. This ended up backfiring as Nixon ended up [[PetTheDog desegregating more schools than any president before him,]] and implemented the the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Plan first significant federal affirmative action program.]]

However, the movement still had much to do and, by the end of the 1960s, had major problems. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and radical "[[MalcolmXerox Black Power]]" leaders and groups such as Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party, MalcolmX, Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam began to attract angry black recruits who had lost patience with King's non-violent philosophy. Unlike the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, Black Power rejected integration, feeling that white society was corrupt and decadent, and declared that black people should voluntarily segregate themselves from white society. The rise of Black Power at the end of the '60s, combined with a series of race riots in UsefulNotes/LosAngeles, [[MotorCity Detroit]] and elsewhere, ultimately provided a flawed excuse for white backlash against civil rights and led to the election of RichardNixon on a platform of "returning to normalcy."

----

One of the most important events in American history, the Civil Rights Movement brought about progress towards racial equality under the law, after America largely spent the hundred years after the Civil War ignoring the fact that blacks and other minorities were still being treated like second class citizens with little to no rights in many parts of the country. The [[TheDeepSouth Southern states]], despite losing the AmericanCivilWar and the abolition of slavery (or [[WildMassGuessing possibly]] ''[[SoreLoser because]]'' [[SoreLoser of those occurrences]]), had found numerous loopholes to keep blacks down: "Jim Crow" laws were drafted following the end of reconstruction in many Southern states, while the hypocritical and inherently flawed concept of "Separate but Equal" segregation denied minorities in the South basic rights. Black people even found it difficult to vote, despite having the right to, since states could (and did) impose literacy tests (extremely difficult ones, which were often rigged) and poll taxes.[[hottip:*:If you're wondering why these didn't apply to whites, it's because the laws had exemptions for people whose fathers or grandfathers could vote at the time of the law's passage. This is where we get the term "{{grandfather clause}}."]]Many other groups also faced discrimination by some.

The date when the {{civil rights movement}} started is not definitive and is still debated among historians; some credit the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, others when HarryTruman forcibly integrated the [[YanksWithTanks US Army]] during his presidency. Most often though, two moments in the 1950s stand out as the turning points which brought the movement together as far as catalysts go. The first one was ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the controversial 1896 ''Plessy v. Fergeson'' Supreme Court ruling which legalized segregation. "Brown" was a 9-0 ruling that basically called out the utter hypocrisy of segregation by way of pointing out that "separate but equal" was essentially code for "white people get nice things, but black people get barely functioning, barely usable versions of what white people take for granted."

The second catalyst was a moment towards the end of 1955, when a woman by the name of Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person, as was demanded by standard bus policy at the time in the city of Montgomery, Alabama. The act wasn't meant to be a major protest action by Parks, but after the bus driver had her arrested for refusing to give up her seat, things snowballed as Rosa's act of defiance against institutionalized racism made her a lightning rod for the various factions within the black community to rally behind. A young minister named Martin Luther King Jr., along with local NAACP head E. D. Nixon, decided to use Rosa's arrest as the rallying cry to unite the black community of the south to end the busing discrimination issue via a mass boycott of the offending bus company. It was a long struggle, but King and the movement prevailed against the municipal government's frantic attempts to frustrate them and acts of violence by both natives and incoming thugs to try to intimidate them.

Martin Luther King, Jr. became the most notable leader of the civil rights movement, and became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference upon its founding in 1957. The SCLC, along with the NAACP and ACLU, were at the head of the fight, using the boycott and non-violent protests to make their point. Their work would have such great success and influence that, by the 1960s, the anti-war movement (for the most part) adopted the same non-violence approach as the civil rights movement. King's CrowningMomentOfAwesome can be said to have come on August 28, 1963, when he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., which for many summed up the importance of the movement and the future that the movement was striving to achieve.

Other people found their own glory. The Freedom Riders, for example, tested out a favorable Supreme Court decision on intercity bus stations to challenge segregation in the face of vicious resistance. That resistance included outright terrorism--such as the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four little girls--in the hopes of cowing African-Americans into submission. In 1964, the activists took it up still another level as they dared to enter the lion's mouth in Mississippi, the most virulently segregated state of them all, with "Freedom Summer". In that summer of ''MississippiBurning'', idealistic northern college students, following the lead of the local activist leadership, took on the racist establishment with education, while their enemies were so afraid that they loaded up on cops and even a ''tank'' to stop them.

Despite the gravitas of this movement, evidence of it was hardly seen in popular culture until later on in TheSixties. The mainstream media largely ignored the movements until the late 1950s, when the struggle and police violence against members of the movement began to be filmed, serving as ready-made fodder for the growing television news genre. Martin Luther King Jr. and company proved quick studies in media savvy and worked the reporters well, taking advantage of the fact that their enemies were all but threatening them. Politically, President DwightDEisenhower was infamously silent on the matter in public, though in private he supported desegregation and even authorized the use of the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation in Arkansas, a state whose governor (Orval Faubus, not George Wallace as most people think) tried to use the National Guard to prevent black students from attending white schools. Both JohnFKennedy and LyndonJohnson supported the movement, culminating in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which made illegal the "Jim Crow" trickery that kept minorities from being able to vote.

However, the movement still had much to do and, by the end of the 1960s, had major problems. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and radical "[[MalcolmXerox Black Power]]" leaders and groups such as Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party, MalcolmX, Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam began to attract angry black recruits who had lost patience with King's non-violent philosophy. Unlike the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, Black Power rejected integration, feeling that white society was corrupt and decadent, and declared that black people should voluntarily segregate themselves from white society. The rise of Black Power at the end of the '60s, combined with a series of race riots in LosAngeles, [[MotorCity Detroit]] and elsewhere, ultimately provided a flawed excuse for white backlash against civil rights and led to the election of RichardNixon on a platform of "returning to normalcy."

As of this writing, the Civil Rights Movement is still within living memory, and many of the participants on both sides are still alive. Those who were on the racist side are often, today, deeply ashamed of their former attitudes ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Massery Hazel Massery]] is one example). Others are finally being prosecuted for their crimes (when, for example, former lynchers feel the prick of conscience and confess). And racism still exists in many forms (beyond the overt cross-burning and men in white hoods), but these days the civil rights movement is fractured and has no clear leader.

In the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election, many looked at the election as the ultimate litmus test towards whether or not the civil rights movement had succeeded, as the idea of Americans having the chance to elected an African-American to the Presidency would be the ultimate way to see if the movement's successes had any impact upon the generations who came afterwards. Needless to say, [[BarackObama Barack Obama's]] election not only proved that the movement did indeed bring progress but also proved that there was still more work to be done.

One of the most important events in American history, the Civil Rights Movement brought about the achievement of true racial equality under the law, after America largely spent the hundred years after the Civil War ignoring the fact that blacks and other minorities were still being treated like second class citizens with little to no rights in many parts of the country. The [[TheDeepSouth Southern states]], despite losing the AmericanCivilWar and the abolition of slavery (or [[WildMassGuessing possibly]] ''[[SoreLoser because]]'' [[SoreLoser of those occurrences]]), had found numerous loopholes to keep blacks down: "Jim Crow" laws were drafted following the end of reconstruction in many Southern states, while the hypocritical and inherently flawed concept of "Separate but Equal" segregation denied minorities in the South basic rights. Black people even found it difficult to vote, despite having the right to, since states could (and did) impose literacy tests (extremely difficult ones, which were often rigged) and poll taxes.[[hottip:*:If you're wondering why these didn't apply to whites, it's because the laws had exemptions for people whose fathers or grandfathers could vote at the time of the law's passage. This is where we get the term "{{grandfather clause}}."]]Many other groups also faced discrimination by some.

However, the movement still had much to do and, by the end of the 1960s, had major problems. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and radical "[[MalcolmXerox Black Power]]" leaders and groups such as Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party, MalcolmX, Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam began to attract angry black recruits who had lost patience with King's non-violent philosophy. Unlike the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, Black Power rejected integration, feeling that white society was corrupt and decadent, and declared that black people should voluntarily segregate themselves from the "white devils." To many people, white and black alike, it was little more than an inversion of the white supremacism that they had opposed. The rise of Black Power at the end of the '60s, combined with a series of race riots in LosAngeles, [[MotorCity Detroit]] and elsewhere, ultimately sparked white backlash against civil rights and led to the election of RichardNixon on a platform of "returning to normalcy."

As of this writing, the Civil Rights Movement is still within living memory, and many of the participants on both sides are still alive. Those who were on the racist side are often, today, deeply ashamed of their former attitudes ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Massery Hazel Massery]] is one example; [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_now George Wallace]] was another). Others are finally being prosecuted for their crimes (when, for example, former lynchers feel the prick of conscience and confess). And racism still exists, but these days the civil rights movement is heavily fractured and has no clear leader, with those at the forefront (Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) known more for their self-promotion and scandal-filled pasts (Jackson and Sharpton have both made offensive remarks about the Jewish community, Jackson had a child out of wedlock, and Sharpton's reputation was [[NeverLiveItDown tarnished]] by his involvement in the controversial Tawana Brawley case).

In the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election, many looked at the election as the ultimate litmus test towards whether or not the civil rights movement had succeeded, as the idea of Americans having the chance to elected an African-American to the Presidency would be the ultimate way to see if the movement's successes had any impact upon the generations who came afterwards. Needless to say, [[BarackObama Barack Obama's]] election proved that the movement did indeed have its desired impact.