Racial Inequality

With help from Charles K. Steele, and Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, giving him and fellow African-Americans grounds to progress in their civil rights activities. King had a strong philosophy of nonviolent resistance which ended him in jail on numerous occasions.

In September of 1957 in Little Rock Arkansas, nine African-American students, later to become known as the Little Rock Nine, are blocked from entering Central High School. Orval Faubus, the governor, orders this action in denial of the integration that is taking place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends in the military to act on behalf of the students.

On February 1st 1960, four African-American students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College are refused service at Woolworth’s lunch counter and begin to stage a sit in. This act becomes a catalyst for many other sit-ins at all sorts of other public facilities all over the nation. Six months later the same four students are served at the lunch counter that they had previously been denied.

In April of that year the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is organized at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Caroline. This gives African-American students a voice in the Civil Rights Movement.

In May of 1961 we find the first wave of “freedom riders”. This is a group of student volunteers sent by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to test the laws of desegregation in public transit. They first encounter problems in Alabama where an angry mob lights their bus on fire in protest. This only fuels the movement and by the end of that summer over 1,000 students had participated in the transportation trials.

Then in October James Meredith enrolls at the University of Mississippi sending white students into a frenzy of violent riots. President Kennedy sends 5,000 troops over in support of Meredith.

Finally in April 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in Birmingham, Alabama during a peaceful protest. While incarcerated he writes his famous “letter from Birmingham Jail” in which he states that it the moral obligation of people to challenge unjust laws. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was “well timed,” according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.” We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

And this is how The Civil Rights Movement helped shape America into the closer-to-equality country it is today. Hate Crimes are still in existence though, and it is still the obligation of not only Americans, but of all people world wide to take action, and not to hate, but to love for we are all but human beings, brothers and sisters in this home we share, this homeland called Earth.