CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement

The campaigning movement to liberate African American U.S. citizens from legal and institutional oppression is often called the civil rights movement. The rights for which the movement fought included direct rights to political and legal participation but also rights to full and equal participation in public activities that are not, at first glance, overtly political. 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. In Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” he describes the urgent need for reform, cataloguing a series of injustices that includes lynchings, police brutalities, and poverty among African Americans, and ending with his own personal dilemma when trying to explain to his young daughter why a television advertisement for an amusement park is not aimed at her and why the park will exclude her. Elimination of discrimination in all areas was, and remains, one of the core goals of the movement. And the African American campaign should be understood as generating and working alongside related civil rights campaigns to end discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, disability, and species membership.

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 anticolonial and indigenous groups' campaigns against imperial domination, which aim for political self-determination and from campaigns for wider respect for welfare rights in general.

Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King was a strong African American civil rights leader that helped change the nation in so many ways. He spoke up for everyone who did not have a mouthpiece to say anything. It can be seen how racially this country was divided which was seen during the shows or reading books about the subject (Perry, 1992). In one of his speech, which was given to show the world that colored people had enough and to dramatize the shameful conditions stated in the speech, as well. So, in effect people had the laws a long time ago against this type of discrimination, but they were not enforced properly. As stated in the constitution every citizen has rights and is equal and free. He came to those steps to prove a point: after ...