And when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and city, we will be able to speed

up that day when all of God’s children-black men and white men, Jews

and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants-will be able to join hands and

to sngn in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at

last; thank God almighty, we are free at last.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The civil rights movement in the United States was a political, legal, and social struggle that was organized primarily by black Americans with some help from white America. The civil rights struggle was aimed at gaining full citizenship and racial equality for all Americans, particularly the most discriminated group, African Americans, and was first and foremost a challenge to segregation. Segregation was deeply embedded in the South and was used to control blacks since the reconstruction of the South following the American Civil War. During the civil rights movement, individuals and organizations challenged segregation and discrimination by

By November 1960, one hundred and fifty-five communities across the South had television crews that were filming the demonstrations and the injustice that the students faced, white America, through the use of the mass media was seeing the same scenes over and over and for the first time witnessed segregation in the South; the scenes shown were of students patiently waiting to get served, angry white hecklers, and carloads of students being taken to jail by police. White students joined in, and in the North, many students boycotted the larger stores in the North that had lunch counters in the South, such as Woolworths. The culmination of the “sit-ins” occurred in Nashville, Tennessee, when, surprisingly, an unlikely ally emerged for the “sit-ins.” The mayor of Nashville, Ben West, announced that lunch counters in Nashville would not be segregated. When asked why he made that decision, West replied, “I could not agree that it was morally right for someone to sell them merchandise and refuse them service

King’s and other black leaders along with the protestors of the Montgomery bus boycott hard work eventually paid off, in November 1956, a federal court ordered that Montgomery’s buses desegregate. The Montgomery bus boycott was one of the milestones of the civil rights movement because it established a national civil rights movement that recognized King as the leader and showed that nonviolent protest would work.

The civil rights movement direct action marches, for the most part, ended with the march on Washington D.C. In August 1963, over 200,000 civil rights supporters conducted a peaceful march in Washington, D.C.; it was at this demonstration that King gave his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.” Because of this march, President Kennedy proposed a new civil rights law; after Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress as a tribute to Kennedy.

It wasn’t that I came to love Negroes; it was that I came to despise the system that did this. I mean, the nearest thing you could be in the army to being black was to be a company officer with black troops, because you lived and operated under the same circumstances they did, and they got crapped all over . . . You were sort of a second-class officer or a second-class white because of your assignment.

Fleming was a conventional white southerner born in Atlanta, Georgia, after he became involved in civil rights issues and according to Fleming, many of his white southern contemporaries would say, “You ought to know better, being a native-born Georgia white.” With all these factors in place, the civil rights movement in America emerged around the mid 1950s.

Some topics in this essay:
Conference SCLC, Montgomery Alabama, People NAACP, President Johnson, Eugene Connor, John Kennedy, Ezall Blair, Jim Crow, Supreme Court, War II, civil rights, civil rights movement, rights movement, voting rights, montgomery bus boycott, bus boycott, montgomery bus, freedom rides, discrimination blacks, montgomery alabama, supreme court, rights act, voting rights act, rights act 1965, segregation discrimination blacks,