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The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement in its contemporary form started in 1955 with an act of mild disobedience by a black woman on a bus in the Deep South. Black leaders developed several strategies over the next few years, strategies that would be successful in changing laws and in getting some of the long-standing discriminatory institutions of the South changed. Between 1954 and 1965, the Civil Rights Movement developed into a major movement for social justice, societal change, and self-determination for millions of black Americans. The tactics undertaken by the movement have ranged from violent to non-violent, with non-violent predominating under the direction of Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers. The white establishment did not merely sit back and watch as leaders like King changed race relations in America, and as has been revealed since, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI waged a battle against leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including King, and attempted to exert control of this leadership to effect the outcome.

There had been civil rights organizations in America for some time, groups such as the NAACP that worked for the legal rights of blacks, but civil rights as a major social movement started in the 1950s. The year 1954 is a key one in the Civil Rights Movement that would follow because that was the year of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (also known as Brown v. Topeka). This decision was one of several forces at work in the early 1950s and into the 1960s that caused the Civil Rights Movement to develop. By executive order, the armed forces were in the process of integrating beginning in 1948, a process expected to take 10 years. This influenced thinking in the private sector as well, and Blacks wanted to accelerate the process and extend it through all of society. At the same time, the Supreme Court offered further hope by striking down the "separate but equal" doctrine in Brown v. Board...

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The Civil Rights Movement. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:35, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690433.html