AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

African American History: Civil Rights Movement Leaders

African American History: Civil Rights Movement Leaders

Introduction

The campaigning movement to liberate African American U.S. citizens from legal and bureaucratic oppression is often called the civil rights movement. The rights for which the movement fought included direct rights to political and legal participation (e.g., removal of restrictions on voter registration and discrimination in law courts) but also rights to full and equal participation in public activities that are not, at first glance, overtly political (such as desegregated shopping, employment, and public transport). The range of activities over which the civil rights movement fought reflects the wide range of aspects of life that are central to one's full and equal participation in society: education, economic activities, and family life, including marriage. These various civil rights movements, with their overriding aim to secure for all citizens a full and equal status as members of the community, should be distinguished from anti colonial and indigenous groups' campaigns against imperial domination, which aim for political self determination and from campaigns for wider respect for welfare rights in general.

Discussion

The civil rights movement, a social movement for racial equality with the U.S., the civil rights of Black people, widely held in the 1950s and 1960s and led to the abolition of the practice of racial segregation in the southern states and the U.S. Congress to adopt a number of laws to protect citizens' rights. The civil rights movement was of nonviolent; it was attended by representatives of both white and black population. Below we are discussing the two most prominent and successful leaders of the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was an African American activist unanimously considered the mother of the Civil Rights Movement for her refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. Although her rebellious act was minimized for years, passed off as more the result of fatigue than of conscious militancy, Parks is now recognized as the one having provided the impetus for the Montgomery bus boycott and the ensuing Civil Rights Movement.

Pivotal Act of Rebellion

When Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus, she was arrested, and on December 8, 1955, she was found guilty of violating a local ordinance after a mere 30-minute trial. Yet, what initially appeared like a defeat would become a landmark ...