How Did Booker T Washington Affect The Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement took place during the 1950s and 1960s. It was for blacks to have the same rights as everyone else. When the civil war ended so did slavery but blacks were still discriminated against. When the 14th Amendment came along blacks had equal protection. The 15th Amendment gave blacks the right to vote. Whites did not like that blacks were able to vote and had some equal rights as them. They came up with this hard test called the literacy test knowing that black could not pass the test. If a black male were to take the test and fail he would be unable to vote. It was the only way whites could stop blacks from voting. Although it was not in the Northern part blacks were still looked down on and discriminated against.

Booker T Washington was born a slave and later moved with his family to Malden West Virginia. Being that Washington was in poverty he did not get regular schooling. When he was nine he started working in a salt furnace, than later one he started at a coal mine. Eager to get and
education he went to Hampton Normal and Agricultural institute known as Hampton University today. Booker T started working as a janitor to pay off some expenses. Washington was chosen to teach a Normal school for African Americans at Tuskegee. The school was two small buildings, no equipment and very little money.

Washington believed that the best interests of black people in the post-Reconstruction era could be realized through education in the crafts and industrial skills and the cultivation of the virtues of patience, enterprise, and thrift.
He urged his fellow blacks, most of whom were impoverished and illiterate farm labourers, to temporarily abandon their efforts to win full civil rights and political power and instead to cultivate their industrial and farming skills so as to attain economic security. Blacks would thus accept segregation and discrimination, but their eventual acquisition of wealth and culture would gradually win for them the respect and acceptance of the white community. This would break down the divisions between the two races and lead to equal citizenship for blacks in the end. In his epochal speech (September 18, 1895) to a racially mixed audience at the Atlanta Exposition, Washington summed up his pragmatic approach in the famous
phrase:

In the 19th century the “Jim Crow laws” were established. At that point blacks were not allowed to use the same bathrooms as whites, live in the same town or even go to the same school. A lot of blacks were farmers, factory workers and servants. President Harry Truman put out an Executive order to stop discrimination in the military. In 1896 the U.S Supreme Court started the court case Plessy V. Ferguson which declared blacks and whites “separate but equal.” It all conspired in 1892 when and African American train passenger Homer plessy refused to sit in a car for blacks.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive order on February 19, 1942. His order helped Americans of any race or origin get government jobs. Men and women fought in World War 2 even though they were being segregated and discriminated against. In 1954, the U.S Supreme Court made it illegal for public schools to be segregated because of the court case Brown v. Board of Education. The court case overturned the case Plessy v. Ferguson

In 1955 segregation laws stated that blacks were to sit in the back of the bus. A 42 year old woman name Rosa Parks was sitting in the first row of the colored section. Parks and some other blacks was ordered to give up her seat because all of the seats in the white section were taken up. The other African Americans complained but moved and Rose refused. Rosa was arrested and fined $10 and for court fees $4. Parks called E.D Nixon who bailed her out of jail.

The women’s political council began a boycott that spreaded all over. Black leaders formed a group called the Montgomery improvement Association. They elected the group leader to be Martin Luther King jr. a 26 year old pastor. Martin Luther King Jr. went to a segregated public school and at the age of 15 went to Morehouse College to study medicine and law. When he graduated he attended seminary school in pennsylvania. He got his bachelor of Divinity. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played a huge role in the civil rights movements. Martin was the leader and person to speak.

The whites did not like Martin because he wanted the segregation to stop. King and his organization (SCLC) went to birmingham Alabama to boycott and protest segregation. This caused King to be arrested because they felt like he was being disobedient.