Civil Rights Movement: The Meaning Of Citizenship In The US

The Civil Rights Movement was by far, the most significant reform movement in history. What is the meaning of citizenship? Citizenship is the character of an individual viewed as a member of society; behavior in terms of the duties, obligations, and functions of a citizen. But African Americans were on a “second” level of society. Segregation, on a social level is the practice or policy of creating separate facilities within the same society for the use of a minority group, and had become deeply rooted into African American live because of the laws, custom, and the terror roused in them. African Americans started standing up for themselves by challenging the segregation system. The Montgomery bus boycott was the first step; sparked by the arrest
of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. The Montgomery Improvement Association coordinated the boycott, and its president, Martin Luther King, Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery.
The bus boycott demonstrated the potential for nonviolent mass protest to successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed. In Stride Toward Freedom, King’s 1958 memoir of the boycott, he declared the real meaning of the Montgomery bus boycott to be the power of a growing self-respect to animate the struggle for civil rights. On 5 June 1956, the federal district court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and in November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Browder v. Gayle and struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses. The court’s decision came the same day that King and the MIA were in circuit court challenging an injunction against the MIA carpools. Resolved not to end the boycott until the order to desegregate the buses actually arrived in Montgomery, the MIA operated without the carpool system for a month. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, and on 20 December 1956 King called for the end of the boycott; the community
agreed. The next morning, he boarded an integrated bus with Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Glenn Smiley. King said of the bus boycott: ‘‘we came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation. So … we decided to substitute tired feet for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery’’ (Papers 3:486). King’s role in the bus boycott garnered international attention, and the MIA’s tactics of combining mass nonviolent protest with Christian ethics became the model for challenging segregation in the South. Freedom Rides became violent. Whites would meet the buses while entering a city and relentlessly beat or even kill the African American passengers. Freedom Rides began to take place, and made clear to the civil rights community the limits of persuasion alone for effecting change.
The growing activism of ending segregation began sweeping across the nation and the most unlikely group of people made the biggest impact.
The sit-ins in Greensboro, Nashville, and Atlanta were not intended. College student wanted to end segregation in public places so they sat at the white only counter and were denied service, they didn't move. The biggest sit-in, took place in Atlanta where African Americans chose to sit in government offices, such as” City Hall, and the State Capitol. Martin Luther King led the people and was arrested for sitting in the all-white Mongolia Room Restaurant in Rich’s Department Store. In 1961, it was declared from the government that there would be no more segregation in
Atlanta.
Nixon in the election of 1960 approached his term in office with a stronger civil rights legislation. Whereas, John F. Kennedy had no role in congressional battles over civil rights, but in order to become more active in the Civil Rights Movement, he began to appoint blacks to high federal positions, such as; Thurgood Marshall to federal appellate court. JFK passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it prohibited discrimination in most places of public accommodation; banned discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. In terms of support, but also growing importance of the federal government, put an end to segregation.