Civil Rights in the 1960s Essay Example for Free

Civil Rights in the 1960s EssayHave you ever sat down and wondered to yourself, what it would be like if schools, restrooms, restaurants, and even humankind cargo ships were still separate today? The majority of people who were born after the 1970s enlist for granted how lucky we are as a country and nation to have overcome slaveholding and the locomote against racism we have battled are way through. Slavery was ended when Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation promulgation in 1863 and was after-hoursr ratified in December of 1865. Though this law ordered the end to thraldom it did very little if nonhing to stop the racism that was effrontery to state of wards portentouss or all other(a) minority. Until the late 1950s not many presidents or Congressman had tried to legislate courtly rights laws. The Civil Rights sputter that heated up to its climax in the 1960s was neither a simple nor wanted occupation by any means. Many Presidents tried taking on the gracious rights movement starting with get to S. Truman.Truman was not for racial par among blacks and of ten-spot said so, only if he wanted fairness and equality before the law (Patterson 378-382). Once Truman got the ball rolling for the first time since Abraham Lincoln, Truman pushed for a Civil Rights meridian and the movement quickly started to escalate and it became 1 of the main issues of American politics. The next man to take blank space was John F Kennedy Kennedy acted as though he had plans to address civil rights issues and is known for saying read not what your country can do for youask what you can do for your country in his world-class address( ). Kennedys plans were never met in his short time as president referable to assignation in 1963.Kennedy dying meant Lyndon Johnson was the next president to take president and her went on to make the next big civil rights legislation when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was established. It withalk the financial backing of milli ons and the wears of thousands for our country to realize that people should not be segregated because of their ethnicity or color of their skin. One of the first and largest groups of civil rights movement supporters was young people and in grumpy college students.A college student in 1963 power saw a very assorted daily landscape than a current college student sees today. Today kids grow up side by side with minority kids end-to-end their daily lives back then they might have been the lucky few and grown up smell at blacks as equals, but more than likely they viewed them as inferiors, or even just gossamer animals. Then these young racists knew know better and went away to College and found themselves in one of the first addresss you could expose support of the civil rights movement. There are many reasons to why the ball picked up speed so fast at universities. The first reason being the young people of the 60s had not lived alongside slaves or indentured servants nor d id they see the great impression or WW2 as had many of their parents and politicians of the times, so they had a different view on racism.The young people of the 60s were viewed by the cured generations specially those of the south, as being soft for not having to deal with the hardships they had to such(prenominal) as the great depression and the World Wars ( ). Instead of leaving to work before graduating high school like people in the1920s and 1930s people were graduating high school and even getting jobs. This caused for a more educated and affluent generation which usually runs along with having certain moral standings such as treating people of a different race equally to people of your own. With a generation bigger than ever before and more people going to college than ever before it caused for a huge explosion of self-freedom. There was many different ways students would show there want of freedom (Patterson 407-408).A very common practice in the 1960s was for blacks and familiar spirit college students to have sit-ins at all purity diners or transportation places. These sit-ins consisted of a group or single African American going in and taking a seat where only whites are allowed to sit and refuse to leave. Hundreds of sit-ins occurred around the nation and many taking place on university campuses run by students themselves. Several of these sit-ins are famed for the effectiveness they afterwards achieved and others for the violence that was caused upon the protestors (Patterson 382-386).The most famous case is the story of Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks was on a public transport in the racist Montgomery, Alabama when the bus driver asked her to give her colored seat to a white man, because the white section was full. Rosa refused to get out of her seat and it resulted in her getting arrested. Rosa was not the first African American to refuse leaving her seat for a white person but she was viewed by the NAACP as the best case to fight in court.( )In the famous words of Jesse Jackson, In many ways, history is marked as before and after Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of requisition began to come down( ).The support of white students to follow fellow African American students to sit-ins was not always there. Local and national news stations started to air live footage of what was happening on the streets to protestors of separatism. The emotion put on a young college student when they see one of their peers that attend college to get an education just like them gets blasted with a fire hose from ten feet away or gets viciously attacked by police dogs.This picture caused thousands of other students to want to fight for transmute as well. Along with the new access to live feed news there were people such as Martin Luther King Jr. who were doing all they could to paint the realistic picture of the life of an American black man during segregation. Luther got his point across in multiple w ays including his famous memoir, Why We Cant Wait, in this memoir he explains how horrible the everyday life of an African American in America can be and how politicians for years have just looked over the horrific treatment of blacks and that it has been too long and the time is now(King Jr 11-13).Besides the sit-ins occurring across the nation African Americans and whites were besides organizing marches to protest segregation as well. Along with the marches inspiring speeches such as Martin Luther Kings famous I Have a Dream speech were given. Kings 17 minute speech that was given in front of over 250,000 Americans on the steps of Lincoln Memorial, is one of the most well-known and miserable speeches in American history(Patterson385-386).A large number of the people in the crowd were college students, due to the petition Martin Luther King drew from young people. He gained this appeal by talking of equality of races and the chance for any man or woman to become whatever they pl eased and not be held back due to race, religion or any other difference a person may have. While students saw the abuse blacks were taking simply for the color of their skin they started to join together on marches and attending civil rights rallies. The more the King, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and many others protested and spread the word of unfair treatment the more support of younger generation people began to support the civil rights movement.Another reason for the large involvement of college students at heart the civil rights movement of the 1960s was due to the dramatically growing amount of student organized groups that were struggle for true democracy and equality to all. One of these organizations was the Students for Democratic Society (SDS). SDS was founded in 1960 but had roots dating to the early 1900s the goal of SDS was to mainly protest and voice the message that equality to all and amicable means makes a successful country ( ). SDS was not the only organi zation that was taking big steps to get the civil rights movement moving, there were hundreds if not thousands of organizations that were meeting about and protesting the civil rights movement. These groups were known for relative young people what they wanted to hear and some even became militant groups. Membership in these organizations grew drastically once Lyndon Johnson started sending more and more troops into Vietnam.The Vietnam War itself had little impact on the civil rights movement of the United States, but it did however portray the world image that America was not going to let communistic governments take control of countries and deny their own people of civil rights. Many Americans did not agree with the war and saw it was neither the time nor the place to go and fight a war on hostile soil when the devastating effects of WW2 were still in the back of peoples minds. The largest critic of the war was overwhelming young people, they saw themselves as the ones being sen t to die for a reason that was not worthy of American lives.Though segregation and a war in Asia appear to have little in common on the surface, during the reform of the 1960s they found each other going hand in hand. Many African Americans of the United States believed that if we were fighting in a foreign country to reserve their peoples civil rights, then they would soon get their civil rights protect as well. They were mistaken and by this and the huge support of the anti-war movement and the animosity growing against the current segregation laws molded into one giant movement. This movement being carried by young people, who saw the possibility of change, carried throughout the nation and became the biggest civil rights movement in American history since abolishing slavery (Patterson 413-422).Now that we have an inclination of what growing up with segregation looks like and how it can split a nation in two, I think I can say that joining the activist movement when it began i n the 1960s was nigh a no brainer to many young people of that generation. They had a tremendous amount of pressure from their fellow black peers to be viewed as equals, they had an unwanted war fueling a large part of the country, and they were also a generation that believed in change and ending the horrible acts that were committed under segregation. With all the pressures from outdoor(a) sources and the generation as a whole going through a freedom crisis, college students came together and became the unadulterated torch barriers for the civil rights movement.