The Beginning
The fight for civil rights has been around for a very long time. It wasn't until the 1950's that the movements really started to take off and inspire. In the 1960's the movements really started to take flight and make a massive impact on society.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks was an activist who started protests in the 1950's and lead the way for many others. She was first majorly noticed when she sat in the front of a bus and refused to move. The front of the bus is where the white people sat. She did this to protest of the treatment of black people. Though she was arrested, she inspired many more civil rights activists to make their voices heard such as Martin Luther King Jr.
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Brown vs. Board
Brown v. Board was a series of cases about the segregation of mainly K-12 public schools. These cases were based around the Plessy v. Ferguson case which said that segregation was okay if the facilities for the black people were equal to those of the white people. This was about the farthest from true with the schools that were available to those of color. The schools that were for colored students were often run down and very small. The school often lacked things like cafeterias and gymnasiums and there often no busses forcing the kids to walk, often from the other side of town, to school. This case addressed the fact that because of the inferior learning environment and that equal cannot really mean equal with black and white students separated, it was impressing on the colored students that they were inferior. This was breaking the 14th amendment and inhibiting the learning of children of color. The Supreme Court agreed and said that separate but equal has no place in education. Schools, not just K-12 but Universities and Colleges, started to remove the segregation though it was not easy for the first black students who started attending originally white schools.
Little Rock Nine
Nine black students were legally attending a previously all white school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. The Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, brought in the National Guard to stop the students from entering the building. President Eisenhower then sent the 101st airborne division to Little Rock to escort black children to school. This continued for a year until Faubus closed the schools.
Sit-ins
Black people, often college students, would often participate in things called Sit-ins. This is where they would go sit in a restaurant that usually only served whites and stay there until they were served of the cops showed up.