Civil Rights Movement In The Classroom

The Civil Rights Movement is one of the most memorable movements in American history. The Civil Rights Movement is taught in classrooms all over the United States every single day. Typically, when one thinks of this movement they think of the late 1950’s and the 1960’s; however, the fight began several decades before then and in some ways still exists today. The reason this movement existed and progressed is because of the local, grassroots pressures and the pressures from nations around the world.
Coming out of the Civil War with the ending of slavery - African Americans had high hope, but the quality of life for them was decreasing rapidly. When slavery was officially ended by Abraham Lincoln in his Emancipation Proclamation, high hopes
White’s had complete control and this was obvious through torture methods such as lynching, segregation, and Jim Crow laws.
In the late 1800’s, African Americans were being lynched by whites often for no reason or for minor crimes. In her “Lynch Law in America” written in 1900, Ida B. Wells states: “The result is that many men have been put to death whose innocence was afterward established; and to-day, under this reign of the “unwritten law,” no colored man, no matter what his reputation, is safe from lynching if a white woman, no matter what her standing or motive, cares to charge him with insult or assault.” This piece examines the state of the nation during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Black men were so inferior, that a woman could even destroy their life. Women had very few rights at this time - they could not vote, yet they could make a claim against a black man and end their life. ‘Unwritten law’ means that actions were taken against blacks and everyone knew it, even though there were no laws about it. Ida B. Wells emerged during this time period with her anti-lynching campaign. Wells is known for her work as a journalist, so she was writing for papers aimed to
Many of the head leaders and head organizations were started in part because of local events such as sit-ins. The fight for justice had to start somewhere, and the logical way to start it was in a local setting and then broadening the range. Sit-ins grabbed local attention, and Ida B Wells anti-lynching crusade forced outside nations to join in on the fight. Without the backing and fighting of the locals in the south - blacks and whites, the Civil Rights Movement would have never been a