Friday, February 27, 2009

The Civil Rights Movement

The Harlem Renaissance began after World War I. This movement really changed the way African Americans were viewed during the 1920’s and 30’s. It was a period marked by literary, artistic, and political achievements. African Americans indirectly made political statements, promoting their goals through art, music, and literature. It was important that the country was seeing the intellectual side of African Americans. Black artists, writers, and musicians, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, really showed their intelligence and artistic abilities and made it evident that African Americans had the same intellectual capabilities as white people.


Though it started a few decades later, the Civil Rights Movement was greatly influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1920’s and 30’s blacks and whites began collaborating for the first time. This idea of both races working together to achieve common goals shaped continued during the 60’s when the Civil Rights Movement was at its peak. In the 50’s and 60’s public facilities in the United States were still very segregated. White and black people were separated almost everywhere, from where they sat in movie theaters to the water fountains they drank out of. During the movement, civil rights activists fought to end this segregation. Racial tensions were high, and when I think of how things were then it saddens me, but it opened the door for countless remarkable achievements, and eventual desegregation. In 1954, in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education, the court ruled that segregated schools were unequal and school desegregation began. The next year, the Montgomery Bus Boycott led to the desegregation of busses. Finally, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial segregation and discrimination was outlawed. This of course did not solve everything, but it was a step in the right direction.




In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen year old boy, was badly beaten and murdered for his interaction with a white female. The two men who murdered him were acquitted by an all-white jury. The horror of this event really sparked the Civil Rights Movement. Till’s murder shocked the country, regardless of race, and many people were moved to action. Before this class, I had never heard the story of Emmett Till. When we were discussing what happened to him, I was shocked that something so terrible happened and I didn’t even know about it. I kept thinking, “How could I have never learned about this in school?” The Civil Rights Movement is something I have always been interested in, and I always thought that I knew a lot about it. But this somehow never came up.



One of the many organizations founded during the Civil Rights Movement was the SNCC, or Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Founded in 1960, the original purpose of the SNCC was to nonviolently combat the racial issues of the time. A few years later, however, their focus shifted to black power and in 1969, they changed the N in their name from nonviolent to national.


In the reading about the similarities and differences between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, it is clear that they actually had a lot in common. Though they had different stances, they both understood each other. They had different philosophies, but both had the same goals.
I think our life experiences absolutely shape our personal philosophies. Perspective is everything. It’s very important to expand your horizons and understand other people’s perspectives. It’s interesting to see how perspectives differ in the people that I know and to try to understand what caused their perspectives to be different from mine. In the case of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, even though they had different philosophies, they both had success during the Civil Rights Movement. Neither philosophy was wrong, they were just different. Sometimes it is most effective to find a middle ground, and that is what we can achieve by exposing ourselves to and incorporating the philosophies and perspectives of others.


Posted by at

1 comment:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)