Advertisement
Advertisement
civil rights movement
The national effort made by black people and their supporters in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate segregation and gain equal rights. The first large episode in the movement, a boycott of the city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, was touched off by the refusal of one black woman, Rosa Parks, to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. A number of sit-ins and similar demonstrations followed. A high point of the civil rights movement was a rally by hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., in 1963, at which a leader of the movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I have a dream” speech. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized federal action against segregation in public accommodations, public facilities, and employment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed after large demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, which drew some violent responses. The Fair Housing Act, prohibiting discrimination by race in housing, was passed in 1968. After such legislative victories, the civil rights movement shifted emphasis toward education and changing the attitudes of white people. Some civil rights supporters turned toward militant movements (see Black Power), and several riots erupted in the late 1960s over racial questions (see Watts riots). The Bakke decision of 1978 guardedly endorsed affirmative action.
Example Sentences
Episodes from the first half of the 1960s, which often featured a young Burt Reynolds as a half-Comanche blacksmith in Dodge City, play like allegories about racism as the civil rights movement was simmering.
The last time the military was deployed without a governor’s request or approval, military experts said, was to facilitate court-ordered desegregation in Southern states during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Devoting generous space to the civil rights movement, the Red Scare, rock ’n’ roll and other sociopolitical foment of the ’50 and ’60s, Freedman can adopt the tone of an earnest YA author: “The kids were looking for fun, at this stage in their lives they weren’t looking to change the world. But change the world they would. There was no colour bar to their love of music.”
The opening of federal work following the Civil Rights Movement provided an alternative to manual labor, teaching or ministerial work in the form of white-collar jobs and skills training that many took into private sector jobs.
The Civil Rights Movement fully exposed that hypocrisy and deep contradiction in American society, but white Americans have made heroic efforts not to see it.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Browse