History UsefulNotes / CivilRightsMovement

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 (SCLC) upon its founding in 1957. Dr. King had previously been a moderate figure, who favored maintaining segregation but making it more lenient towards black Americans; however, his association with the Civil Rights Movement led to an increasing amount of death threats that resulted in a crisis of faith for the reverend, resulting in him taking a more radical stance of abolishing segregation altogether. Dr. King would use his skills as a preacher to act as the biggest public voice of the civil rights movement, delivering powerful speeches and letters advocating for the end of segregation and integration and acceptance of black Americans. Dr. King, a devout Christian, believed that doing so would help create what he dubbed a "Beloved Community," in which all human beings could transcend boundaries of race and come together in God.

After Rosa's publicized arrest, a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr., along with local NAACP head E. D. Nixon, decided to use her arrest as the rallying cry to unite and mobilize 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, on August 28, 1963, 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.

As of this writing, the Civil Rights Movement is still within living memory, and many of the participants on both sides are still alive, with the [[DeadArtistsAreBetter deceased ones]] like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks viewed as great leaders and heroes of American history. 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.

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, UsefulNotes/BarackObama's election not only proved that the movement did indeed bring progress -- in a scant 53 years, America had gone from needing a law to let black people vote at all to a majority of all Americans freely casting their votes for a black man - a man whose parents could not have legally married in several states at the time of his birth - as the President of United States, and even re-elected him -- but also proved that there was still more work to be done.

The Civil Rights Movement itself is also being introduced to the modern generation through the recent debates on whether marriage between UsefulNotes/{{homosexual}}s ought to be legal. In addition to the debate being, essentially, a civil-rights issue to begin with (that label is historically associated with anti-racism measures, and it's too late to change the name now), many commentators are drawing the easily-made comparisons between the arguments against giving gay and non-European people rights under the law --[[ThisIsUnforgivable many of them unflattering to boot]].

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 and was arrested, gaining national attention and giving civil rights groups a chance to unify behind a symbol. Contrary to popular belief, the act was not an accidental act of protest;[[note]]The only tired she was that day was of being pushed around[[/note]] Parks was an activist affiliated with the NAACP and was selected to test the segregation laws in court. Additionally, she was not the first person to resist the segregated bus polices either, but was the one the NAACP decide to use to draw attention to the issue.[[note]][[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudette_Colvin Claudette Colvin]] and several other women had been arrested nine months earlier for refusing to give up their seats but Parks, a respectable housewife, held a better image.[[/note]]

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 UsefulNotes/JackieRobinson among others; Daisy was not called "The Rosa Parks of the North" for nothing.

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.

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 and was arrested, gaining national attention and giving civil rights groups a chance to unify behind a symbol. Contrary to popular belief, the act was not an accidental act of protest;[[note]]The only tired she was that day was of being pushed around[[/note]] Parks was an activist affiliated with the NAACP and was selected to test the segregation laws in court. Additionally, she was not the first person to resist the segregated bus polices either, but was the one the NAACP decide to use to draw attention to the issue.[[note]]Parks, a respectable housewife, held a better image than another woman arrested for the same thing, who'd had a child out of wedlock.[[/note]]

Politically, President UsefulNotes/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 UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy and UsefulNotes/LyndonJohnson were initially apprehensive about the movement, much of the Democratic Party's power base was in the South and neither wanted to alienate those supporters. However, King and company, using the tactics described above, were able to force the issue to the point where the White House had to act. Furthermore, remember that all this happened during The UsefulNotes/ColdWar and the USA became painfully aware that they were hardly going to be able to claim to be morally superior to the Communist Bloc when this racist brutality was being exposed around the world.

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 ''Film/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.

* Music/TheRollingStones' "[[Music/ExileOnMainSt Sweet Black Angel]]", one of the band's few overtly political songs, was written in support of civil rights leader Angela Davis.

* Also alluded to in ''Film/DirtyDancing'', when Neil Kellerman tells Baby that after the summer ends he and some friends will be going down south to freedom ride a bus.

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

-->--'''Creator/MartinLutherKingJr''' (1929-1968)

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 UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt ending racial discrimination in the federal government, others say when UsefulNotes/HarryTruman forcibly integrated the [[YanksWithTanks US Army]] during his presidency, and others point to the role of [[UsefulNotes/HistoryOfTheColdWar Soviet and Maoist funding, cultural contacts, moral support]] (even after the Sino-Soviet Split and border wars in 1960 it remained an issue they could agree on) and agitation on the behalf of African-Americans and Africans in general in the U.N. and off-the-books. 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."

-->--'''Martin Luther King, Jr.''' (1929-1968)

Politically, President UsefulNotes/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 UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy and UsefulNotes/LyndonJohnson were initially apprehensive about the movement, much of the Democratic Party's power base was in the South and neither wanted to alienate those supporters. However, King and company, using the tactics described above, were able to force the issue to the point where the White House had to act. Furthermore, remember that all this happened during The ColdWar and the USA became painfully aware that they were hardly going to be able to claim to be morally superior to the Communist Bloc when this racist brutality was being exposed around the world.

* ''Literature/TheSelmaMassacre'' begins with the titular march being gunned down, and the entire movement takes an extremely violent turn.

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 JackieRobinson among others; Daisy was not called "The Rosa Parks of the North" for nothing.

[[AC:NewspaperComics]]
* Robert (Granddad) Freeman of ''ComicStrip/TheBoondocks'' had an involvement in the movement. He still held a grudge against Rosa Parks for "stealing his thunder" (he was sitting next to her on that bus and likewise refused to give up his seat, but the bus driver was only offended by Rosa's unwillingness to move, not his), and once showed up late to a march because he knew they would bring out the hoses and figured he'd bring a raincoat. A WholeEpisodeFlashback in Season 4 shows that he was one of the Freedom Riders, but his participation was completely involuntary.

* Music/TheRollingStones' "[[Music/ExileOnMainSt]] Sweet Black Angel", one of the band's few overtly political songs, was written in support of civil rights leader Angela Davis.

!!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, UsefulNotes/BarackObama's election not only proved that the movement did indeed bring progress -- in a scant 53 years, America had gone from needing a law to let black people vote at all to a majority of all Americans freely casting their votes for a black man as the President of United States, and even re-elected him with a greater margin -- but also proved that there was still more work to be done.

->''"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"''\\
--'''Martin Luther King, Jr.''' (1929-1968)

* Robert (Granddad) Freeman of ''ComicStrip/TheBoondocks'' had an involvement in the movement. He still held a grudge against Rosa Parks for "stealing his thunder" (he was sitting next to her on that bus and likewise refused to give up his seat, but the bus driver was only offended by Rosa's unwillingness to move, not his), and once showed up late to a march because he knew they would bring out the hoses and figured he'd bring a raincoat.

Politically, President UsefulNotes/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 UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy and UsefulNotes/LyndonJohnson were initially apprehensive about the movement, much of the Democratic Party's power base was in the South and neither wanted to alienate those supporters. However, King and company, using the tactics described above, were able to force the issue to point where the White House had to act. Furthermore, remember that all this happened during The ColdWar and the USA became painfully aware that they were hardly going to be able to claim to be morally superior to the Communist Bloc when this racist brutality was being exposed around the world.