African Americans had been fighting against racial segregation for centuries, however, before the 1950s, not much progress had been made. Instead, they faced life every day in fear of White Americans and the millions of restrictions put on them. The main reason that change occurred during …show more content…
The 1950s sparked off a need from the black population to gain equality with their white counterparts. Many figures the world view as important to history today arose after World War Two. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Andrew Goodman, Malcolm X and many more were citizens that risked their lives to pursue and gain equal rights for the black population. All of them stood for what they believed in and worked extremely hard to bring about a change for the one’s affected by racial segregation and hate. However, racial groups, like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), attacked them physically and mentally making it harder to live in the USA during the …show more content…
They were opposed to the civil rights movement and to racial equality. However they weren't opposed enough to join the clan or to be violent about it. They were more grudging and reluctant and halting. And when they were finally forced to take a stand one way or another, or finally forced - confronted with the fact that their lives might change, then a lot of them reacted in ways that really span the whole gamut. Where some ended up supporting civil rights for a bunch of complicated reasons, not necessarily that they sympathized with the demands, but that they often didn't what their everyday lives to be overturned. In the end, would choose different degrees of support or resistance that were closely to the middle of the spectrum. Some white southerners recount literally trembling in the first moments when they first shook hands with a black African-American man. And these are the smaller things or ways that the effects of the civil rights movement really sipped in and penetrated the very depths of everyday life.
Civil rights activists celebrated the decision, but many white southerners viewed it as an attack on their way of life. Committed to segregation, these southerners were determined to resist efforts to integrate schools. They discovered, however, that President Eisenhower was no ally. In 1957 he reluctantly ordered the U.S. military to enforce desegregation in Little Rock,