The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement had started to gain traction in the mid 1950s after the Murder of Emmet Till, bringing the black community together both mentally and emotionally more than ever along with Rosa Park's refusal to give her seat to a white man. Following these events, the movement took off with media and governmental attention on every new part of the movement. As the movement continued the Brown v. Board of Education supreme court case, ruled that segregation was unconstitutional. The movement made further strides in the U.S. legislature with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which marked the unofficial but official end of Jim Crow Era in the 60s.

“News of Emmett Till’s murder was widely circulated throughout the Black community in the months after his death. Tens of thousands of Black Americans attended his open-casket funeral in September 1955, and images of his mutilated body were printed in Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, both influential Black-centric publications. These images came to symbolize widespread state-sponsored anti-Black violence at the hands of white people. Till’s murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement that followed.” - Britannica, The Murder of Emmett Till

"In December 1955 NAACP activist Rosa Parks’s impromptu refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked a sustained bus boycott that inspired mass protests elsewhere to speed the pace of civil rights reform." - Britannica, Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act

“During the summer of 1957, the Little Rock Nine enrolled at Little Rock Central High School, which until then had been all white. The students’ effort to enroll was supported by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which had declared segregated schooling to be unconstitutional. They encountered a large white mob in front of the school, who began shouting, throwing stones, and threatening to kill the students. The confrontation in Little Rock drew international attention to racism and civil rights in the United States as well as to the battle between federal and state power.” - Britannica, Little Rock Nine

“Four Black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sparked a new phase of the Southern civil rights movement on February 1, 1960, when they staged a sit-in at a drugstore lunch counter reserved for whites. In the wake of the Greensboro sit-in, thousands of students in at least 60 communities, mostly in the upper, urbanized South, joined the sit-in campaign during the winter and spring of 1960.” - Britannica, Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act

“mass protests culminated on August 28, 1963, in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which attracted over 200,000 participants. King used his concluding “I Have a Dream” speech at the march as an opportunity to link Black civil rights aspirations with traditional American political values.” - Britannica, Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act