RACE RELATIONS

Race Relations





Race Relations



The term civil rights movement in the U.S. (civil rights movement) is primarily the struggle of black Americans to obtain and enjoyment of their civil rights. If it can be considered in a broader sense, it refers to any struggle for civil rights in the United States, especially the end of the Civil War (1861-1865) to today, so he understands also the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Movement, the Black Panther Party, the Black Feminism, the Gay Liberation movement, etc... However, usually means by this expression, the struggles fought between 1945 and 1970 to put an end to racial segregation, especially in the southern states (Bates, 2002).

Before the awakening of the 1960s and the Brown decision that preceded it, a chain of causation points to earlier origins. Tracing the chain, we are led back to the period between the two world wars, when friends of civil rights often despaired of even incremental gains. Major changes seemed dreamlike in their remoteness. Still, the interwar years reveal the first noteworthy Stirrings of racial democracy since the collapse of Radical Reconstruction.

Perhaps the beginning of it all was in a migration that awakened new expectations among the most downtrodden black people in the nation. In the early twentieth century the largely rural black population of the South existed in a state of subjugation, many of them at the margin of subsistence. Trapped on the land by debt and ignorance, ravaged by disease and malnutrition, and subject to extremely punitive social controls, they had fallen in some ways below the condition of their forebears.

As the movement grew, what was primarily a middle-class protest attracted lower-class blacks as well. Always more unruly than the smaller middle class, lower-class blacks in the larger towns and cities of the late nineteenth ...