Reconstruction Era Research Paper

The Laws in the Reconstruction Era and the Civil Rights Movement The civil rights movement that started and grew through the years following the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and with the help of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Patterson, 2001) marked an important period that accomplished more than ending segregation in cities and unfair rights; it led to the transformation of American social, cultural, and political life. The civil rights movement did not only demonstrate that the rights of African Americans should not be ignored but also showed how a nation as a whole had the power to change itself. The way the civil rights unfolded, gave others a chance to reach equal opportunity in the future. When one thinks
On December 1, 1955, the NAACP member boarded a public bus and took a seat in the “Negro” section in the back of the bus. Later, Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white passenger, defying the law by which blacks were required to give up their seats to white passengers when the front section, reserved for whites, was filled (Polsgrove, 2001). Parks was immediately arrested. In protest, the black community launched a one-day local boycott of Montgomery’s public bus system. As support for Parks began, the NAACP and other leaders took advantage of the opportunity to draw attention to their cause. They enlisted the help of a relatively unknown preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., to organize and lead a massive resistance movement that would challenge Montgomery’s racist laws (Kohl, 2005). Four days after Parks’ arrest, the citywide Montgomery bus boycott began (Kohl, 2005). It lasted for more than a year. Despite taunting and other forms of harassment from the white community, the boycotters persevered until the federal courts intervened and desegregated the buses on December 21, 1956 (Kohl,
This time, as the peaceful demonstrators approached the Edmund Pettis Bridge, state troopers used police whips and clubs to halt their progress. The scene blasted into American living rooms via the nightly news. After “Bloody Sunday,” thousands of people gathered again to complete the march, this time under the protection of the Alabama National Guard (Powledge, 2001). On August 6, 1965, shortly after the highly publicized events in Selma, President Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, which, for the first time since Reconstruction, effectively opened up the polls to southern black Americans (Davis, 2001). By the mid-1960s, many black activists started to lose faith in the civil rights reforms that thus far had targeted only the most blatant forms of discrimination (Chong, 1991). While King’s nonviolent direct action approach had dominated the movement, many people particularly in the North, adopted a more revolutionary stance. As a wave of nationalist sentiment grew within the movement, organizations such as SNCC and CORE took up more militant agendas. SNCC, for example, began promoting a program of “black power” a term that meant racial pride (Conklin, 2008). The greatest spokesman for Black Nationalism was Malcolm X. With his working-class roots and charismatic style of speaking,