Civil Rights Movement: The Agony and the Ecstasy

Throughout its history the United States has wrestled with civil rights issues. Even at this country’s birth, its Founding Fathers incorporated the Three-Fifths Compromise, ending a dispute over slaves’ votes, into the United States’ very Constitution. Since 1863, at least fifty-eight riots in America have been related to racism (Duncan 6). Winona LaDuke tells of more than 1,000 tailings and slag piles from uranium mines dumped in Native American Din land (3). “Nearby the land is the largest coal strip mine in the world, and some Din teenagers have a cancer rate seventeen times the national average (3).” These crises and struggles for civil rights in the United States culminate in the 1960s, producing the Civil Rights Movement. Although it is called “The Civil Rights Movement,” it is only a section of a greater American struggle for civil rights. This struggle occurred before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement, and it has impacted history through its events, its ideas, and its people.

Before the Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s, its events unfolded against apathy and racism. At the end of the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment

- Negro barbers could not tend to white women (83).

The Civil Rights Movement has impacted U.S. society throughout history in its events, its ideas, and its people. It has torn down walls of segregation de jure, slowly guiding society toward accepting all races and cultures into its wings. No, actually that is wrong; de jure segregation is illegal, but the segregation of today, the segregation du jour, the de facto segregation inherent in unspoken social customs, still runs rampant. Students at a highly accredited high school still segregate without legal imposition into blacks and whites (and football players and other cliques.) The Civil Rights movement presses on today, for more freedom, justice, equality, until one day we can truly let freedom ring throughout America.

- Trains were required to provide “white” cars and “colored” cars (84).

The Civil Rights Movement began around the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and ended near the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Duncan 111-112) Brown vs. Board of Education overturned segregation; Chief Justice Earl Warren declared, “We conclude . . . that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal (Egerton 608).” Then Rosa Parks decided not to give up her seat in a bus; she was fined $14, but she had started a new non-violent protest of segregation lasting 382 days: the Montgomery bus boycott (“Rosa Parks”). Stories of courage and hatred bombard one reading a history book: the attacks on the Freedom Riders (Weinstein and Rubel 594); the Edmund Pettus Bridge demonstration (606); the March on Washington (601); the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls (Duncan 120); the sit-in at Greensboro with Anne Moody (117). The list goes on; Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African-American students from attending Central High School (Weinstein and Rubel 591); Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Selma-to-Montgomery march in the face of violence (608-609); Eugene “Bull” Connor set the police force on nonviolent demonstrators (Boyer et al. 966); the assassination of Dr. King silenced the civil rights leader that appealed to the most (Duncan 122). The African-Americans were not the only ones in need of civil rights, either; Hispanic truants in California were sent to the fields instead of back to school (Anderson ), and one judge is reported as saying, “[Mexican people] are lower than animals and haven’t the right to live in organized society . . . Maybe Hitler was right (Anderson ).”

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