Women in the Civil Rights Movement

Women in the Civil Rights Movement

Introduction

The Civil Rights Movement (1955 - 1968) refers to the movement U.S. aimed to establish a real equality of civil rights for black Americans by abolishing the legislation establishing the racial segregation. The Protestant pastor Martin Luther King, apostle of non-violence, became one of the most famous figures.

Struggles began from the late nineteenth century with the creation of the NAACP and UNIA of Marcus Garvey. However, the first great victory is recorded on the legal register, by the judgment of the Supreme Court in 1954 in Brown v. Board. Board of Education, declaring unconstitutional racial segregation in public schools. The following year, the Montgomery bus boycott was triggered following the arrest of Rosa Parks, who refused to leave her seat on a bus to a white man. In 1956, the Supreme Court declared racial segregation on buses in Alabama unconstitutional.

Around 1966, the emergence of the Black Power movement, globally active from 1966 to 1975, the radical struggle for civil rights, and led to the development of the struggle for racial dignity, economic and political autonomy, and emancipation from the tutelage of whites. The figure of Malcolm X emerges. It invented the neologism of Afro-American to replace the expression, racist according to him, Black American (that means while other Americans based on their national origin).

Several scholars refer to this movement as "second reconstruction", in reference to the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War , during which the slavery was abolished, while blacks were citizens born in America and received the right to vote . However, in 1896 the decision Plessy v. Ferguson legitimized Jim Crow laws in place in the south and other racist legislation.

The civil rights movement, composed of several trends, was the model in various other struggles of the same kind, such as the struggles of Native Americans, which constitutes American Indian Movement and in 1968 succeeded in obtaining the vote of the Indian Civil Rights Act, those of the Chicano Movement, or the Gay Liberation Front, which is a result of the Stonewall riots in 1969.

Role of Women in Civil Rights Movement

Hundreds of American women fulfilled important roles in the nonviolent struggle for a more just society for African Americans.

The civil rights movement took place in the United States during the 50s and 60s and had a Martin Luther King Jr., who was a Baptist minister, as his ...