Civil Rights

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Civil Rights

Civil Rights Movement in the United States, political, legal, and
social struggle by black Americans to gain full citizenship rights and
to achieve racial equality. The civil rights movement was first and
foremost a challenge to segregation, the system of laws and customs
separating blacks and whites that whites used to control blacks after
slavery was abolished in the 1860s. During the civil rights movement,
individuals and civil rights organizations challenged segregation and
discrimination with a variety of activities, including protest marches,
boycotts, and refusal to abide by segregation laws. Many believe that
the movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ended
with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, though there is debate about when
it began and whether it has ended yet. The civil rights movement has
also been called the Black Freedom Movement, the Negro Revolution, and
the Second Reconstruction.
Segregation
Segregation was an attempt by white Southerners to separate the races
in every sphere of life and to achieve supremacy over blacks.
Segregation was often called the Jim Crow system, after a minstrel show
character from the 1830s who was an old, crippled, black slave who
embodied negative stereotypes of blacks. Segregation became common in
Southern states following the end of Reconstruction in 1877. During
Reconstruction, which followed the Civil War (1861-1865), Republican
governments in the Southern states were run by blacks, Northerners, and
some sympathetic Southerners. The Reconstruction governments had passed
laws opening up economic and political opportunities for blacks. By
1877 the Democratic Party had gained control of government in the
Southern states, and these Southern Democrats wanted to reverse black
advances made during Reconstruction. To that end, they began to pass
local and state laws that specified certain places For Whites Only
and others for Colored. Blacks had separate schools, transportation,
restaurants, and parks, many of which were poorly funded and inferior
to those of whites. Over the next 75 years, Jim Crow signs went up to
separate the races in every possible place.
The system of segregation also included the denial of voting rights,
known as disfranchisement. Between 1890 and 1910 all Southern states
passed laws imposing requirements for voting that were used to prevent
blacks from voting, in spite of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution
of the United...

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