CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT ESSAY:
Montgomery bus boycott
Loughborough University May, 2011
In 1865, slavery was abolished throughout the United States, with the vote of the Thirteenth Amendment ("Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly recognized convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction") and the fourteenth (this ensures the right of suffrage to all citizens of the United States of America), and fifteenth amendments ("The right voting U.S. citizens will be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude") were voted in 1868 and 1870, which guaranteed the civil rights of African-American population, and equality before the law with whites.
However, these constitutional amendments were not heeded. White citizens who were in a perspective where blacks were inferior beings, continued with what is called segregation. We will study one of the major movements that allowed Black Americans to improve their civil rights and the bus boycott in Montgomery that is a social and political campaign initiated in 1955 in Alabama to oppose the policy of racial segregation in municipal public transport. Leading to the arrest of Rosa Parks, who is a black American woman; she refused to give up her seat to a white person in a bus. This boycott lasted from December 5, 1955 to December 21, 1956.
How was the movement? Who are involved? What is the result? That is what we will develop here.
But first, back to what happened before the boycott, the segregation of black American people.
Segregation has occurred after the end of slavery, black people were free, but with regard to being "equal ", they were far away. The doctrine of "Separate but equal" allowed to keep them at disadvantage. Racial segregation existed both in public places as voters: in the field of education
Bibliography: Romano, Renee Christine, The Civil Rights movement in American memory, 2006 Parks, Rosa, Rosa Parks: my story/Rosa Parks, 1999 Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson, The Montgomery bus boycott and the women who started it: the memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, 1987