Civil Rights Movement
...Movement lasted, mainly, from 1955 through 1968, and was a nonviolent movement. Was America ready for equal liberties and freedom? It took thirteen long, hard years to find out.
Even though the years 1955 through 1968 are given as the dates of the movement, the fight for civil rights started before then and continues today. The dates are simply when the movement became mainstream and was brought to the forefront as one of America's main issues. The fight for civil rights has been going on since the beginning of America, when Africans were transported to the "New World" to be enslaved. After slavery was abolished, people still treated blacks inferior to whites, not allowing them to vote and taking away various other rights that each American citizen should have.
The "mainstream" Civil Rights Movement began in 1955, when Emmett Till's brutal murder in Money, Mississippi. He was accused of whistling at a white woman in the store and later on, two men showed up at his uncle's house and kidnapped him. They brutally beat him, put a bullet through his skull, and disposed of the body in the Tallahatchie River late at night on August 28, 1955.
The two men were arrested the day after Till's Disappearance, but were acquitted a month later by an all-white jury. Emmett Till's mother chose to have an open casket funeral to show the world the horrible and sadistic way her son was killed.
The event that followed shortly after in Montgomery, Alabama was another act that helped trigger the Civil Rights Movement. Rosa Parks, a black woman, was told to move from her seat on the bus after a white passenger got on the bus, but she refused. She was arrested, tried, and convicted of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. When people found out about this there was a gathering of fifty black residents and they started to Montgomery Bus Boycott to protest segregation...
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