African American Participation In The Civil Rights Movement

The persistence of European immigration throughout the latter half of the 1800s and the early years of the 1900s maintained the color line between northern industry and southern agriculture. The north’s demand for labor was continually satisfied by the inflow of European immigrants, ensuing no need to invade the south’s supply of African American labor. However, in the years leading up to the first World War, immigration slowed down and was ultimately cut off once the war commenced. This abrupt plummet in the number of available immigrant workers to northern industries caused major shortages within the labor markets. This forced employers to repress their prejudice hiring practices and look to the African American population to satisfy their
2). In 1954, the civil rights movement surfaced in an attempt to annihilate the oppression that had been effecting the lives of African Americans since the dawn of slavery. Nearly a century after emancipation, African Americans were still subjected to Jim Crow laws and the lack of basic civil rights. Therefore, activists began to participate in nonviolent, mass protests and marches throughout the United States to obtain national recognition of the inequalities so deeply rooted into the American society. This uprising of the civil rights movement proved successful in generating legal ratification (Baron, 1971, p. 38). Many legal victories, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, were established yet the struggle for economic equality for African Americans
Beginning in the 1970s, wage rates began to decline and unemployment rates began to rapidly rise. This economic crisis that arose broadened the economic oppression that effected the African American population (Taylor, 2016, p. 53). These conditions remain unremitting in the current economic state of the United States. Undoubtedly, African Americans and other nonwhite minority groups, such as Hispanics, suffer the most from these circumstances, while whites are consistently more prosperous. Many people in the United States believe that persistent racial inequalities, in such cases as wages, income, residence, and healthcare, can be attributed to African American culture and individual failures, not racism (Brown, 1971, p. 6). However, this cannot explain the continuance of inequality once African American individuals acquire the education, skills, and experience necessary to prosper in the labor market. Whites still have an advantage over blacks and the attitudes of many white Americans remain unchanged because of the negative stereotypes that have accumulated. Moreover, the problem with the apparent advantage that whites