Racial Inequality

But all this didn’t happen over night. It took years of struggle, reforms, sweat, and blood to bring us to the point of equality we are currently at. In this essay I will chart the history of one of the most important movements ever to hit America, the Civil Rights Movement.

African-Americans arrived in America about 350 years ago. They didn’t come of their own free will, or to find a better way of life like other Americans. They were stolen out of their home land and shipped here to work as indentured servants. Those who came after 1661, when slavery became legal, never even had the chance at free life. They had absolutely no civil rights, and were treated in the most inhumane way possible. This heinous reality continued until 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln passed the Emancipation Proclamation, which legally freed all slaves in the rebellious states. This was the first big step towards actual freedom, but it’s in the next hundred years that we see the true struggle.

The Civil rights movement actually begins in 1954 when Linda Brown was denied admission to a local white elementary school in Topeka, Kansas. Her law suit combined with others reached the Supreme Court in the milestone case of Brown v. The Board of Education. Finding it unconstitutional, Chief Justice Earl Warren overruled the case of Plessey v. Ferguson, which legalized the “separate but equal” law of segregated schooling, allowing for African-Americans to be admitted into white school.

The next critical event in the movement is the brutal murder of Emmett Till in August of 1955. While visiting family in Mississippi, he is said to have whistled at the wife of store owner Roy Bryant, who was needless to say, a white man. A few days later Emmett is kidnapped, horribly beaten, and shot in cold blood. His hardly recognizable body is thrown in the Tallahatchie River. Roy Bryant and his half brother are arrested for the murder. It took hardly and hour for the all white jury to acquit the two of the crime. They are later to have been recorded bragging about the murder in a magazine interview. Enraging the African-American community, this throws things into high gear.

That same year we have the acclaimed and courageous Rosa Lee Parks making another crucial move in Montgomery, Alabama. Being an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) she refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested, and creates incentive for the Montgomery Bus Boycott to go into action. This peaceful protest is successful and brings the brilliant Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into the picture. Dr. King played one of the most important roles in the Civil Rights Movement setting the stage for different forms of nonviolent protest. Rosa Parks is later award the Congressional gold medal in 1999.