Protest Makes a Civil Rights Revolution

During the civil rights era of 1960s, African Americans and their allies took massive ‘direct actions” in marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, boycotts. Direct action rejected the legal strategy of the NAACP and the slow progress of preparing black Southerners to pass the battery of obscure these for voting. It drew the attention of television, the new entertainment medium, which eagerly covered the events, especially when white supremacists inflicted unimaginable acts of violence on peaceful protestors. The television coverage made non black Americans aware of the struggle around the world. In 1964 and 1965 Congress passed sweeping civil rights that struck down the basis of legal segregation and disfranchisement. The legislation revolutionized American law. The legal changes, though sweeping did not reverse structural inequities in places where segregation was not enshrined in law.

Main Points:

• The white women at the North Carolina Women’s College at Greensboro and students elsewhere in North Carolina began supporting the sit-ins.

• Soon young people all around the South, even Mississippi, were sitting in restaurants, churches, libraries, bowling alleys, and bus and train waiting rooms.

• White supremacists tormented them verbally and physically by calling them abusive names, dumping bottles of ketchup and mustard on them, even grinding lighted cigarettes on their bare skin. Despite provocation, the students remained non-violent.

• The highlander Folk School in Tennessee held a workshop at which the students learned ti sing 'we shall over came for the first time. The song became the anthem of Black civil rights movement.

• The student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to embody the student movement. But SNCC welcomed non-blacks: "This movement should not be considered one for Negroes but on for people who consider this is a movement against injustice. This would include members of all races."

• In mid-1961 student activists from SNCC and from the Congress of Racial and Equality (CORE) tested the desegregation in transportation as "Freedom Riders".

• In Anniston, Alabama, a mob set the Freedom Riders' bus on fire and attacked he riders as to escape the smoke and flames.the police did nothing to protect the riders.

• The Freedom riders achieved victory, but at a terrible bodily and psychological cost.

• In 1961 SNCC shifted attention away from direct action and toward voter registration-- a shifted Kennedy administration encouraged.

• trick questions, intimidation, and violence made successful registration a rare achievement. Pointing low numbers of black voters , segregationists argues that African Americans didn't want to vote.

• to disprove their claim, Hamer and Mosses, and other civil rights workers conducted a mock election in 1962.The 1963 March on Washington made the Martin Luther King jr., the most prominent symbol of the Civil Rights movement.

• However, the march on Washington was more than just socially visionary. In line with Randolph's concerns about rampant unemployment, the March was for "jobs and freedom".

• Structural changes such as deindustrialization and suburbanization generated crises in American cities, symbolized in he urban unrest of 1964-1967.

• The Vietnam War diverted Federal funds from programs aimed at bettering the economic situation of the poor, including urban African American.

• The reaction against black rights was much older than the 1960s, but it gained force in the face of the black empowerment.

• As the cities became largely black, they came to be called ghettos. It was in there "ghettos" African American artists and activists grasped the beauty and promise of black neighborhoods.

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