Emmett Till, a fourteen year …show more content…
Board of Education case ending segregation in schools, the murder of the fourteen-years-old boy Emmett Till was an important catalyst for the CRM. Several important leaders in the CRM, such as Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Rosa Parks, the first in the boycotts all released statements about Till’s murder. “I thought about Emmett Till, and I couldn’t go back [to the back of the bus]” said Rosa Parks. Exactly one hundred days after Till’s murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Alabama, triggering the one year long Montgomery Bus Boycott, launching the CRM forward at full force. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “[Emmett Till’s murder was] one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the 20th century.” He was not the only one that saw the issues in the discrimination of races. After learning of the murder, more and more black people joined the CRM, and with their countless efforts day and night to achieve equality between the races, in 1964 the Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing many forms of discrimination and segregation, and finally in 1965, the Voting Rights Act outlawed the discrimination in voting practices, finally giving back to the black people the rights they deserved from the very