Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4th, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death caused much grief and sadness and marked a horrible day in the civil rights movement. His non- violent approach to the movement shed light for his followers and new leader Reverend Abernathy. The civil rights movement and the people involved in it had completed and accomplished so much in such a long amount of time. Although the struggle still continues, the leaders of the movement, such as Booker T. Washington, Du Bois, Malcolm X, and the Martin Luther King Jr., have defiantly completed as much as they could in the past decades. This movement is such a significant part of our history that it should not be taken lightly for if none of this happened, who knows what our society would be like today.

On June 11th, 1963, President Kennedy announced a bill to Congress to provide "the kind of equality of treatment which we would want ourselves". Approximately 200,000 people took part in a march on Washington to urge Congress to approve the bill and to protest against job discrimination. These bills were called The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.

Even after the ratification of these three amendments, white southerners made it difficult for African Americans to gain the freedoms that they were granted. Poll taxes, the grandfather clause, and literacy tests made it almost impossible for African Americans to vote. Jim Crow laws, which were laws calling for segregation of the races in public places, were anything but equal. In 1896, there was a supreme court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, that stated that segregation was okay as long as it was equal; in other words "separate but equal". The hearing was about a man named Homer Plessy who refused to leave a "whites only" railroad car because the state law requiring segregated cars violated his right to "equal protection of the law"

Some topics in this essay:
African Americans, Rights Act, King Jr, Mississippi Emmett, North Carolina, United America, President Kennedy, National Guard, Du Bois, Board Education, civil rights, african americans, luther king jr, rights act, luther king, martin luther, civil rights movement, rights movement, martin luther king, king jr, du bois, elementary school, civil rights act, white elementary school, booker washington,