How Did The Civil Rights Movement Start

The Civil Rights Movement: [Subtitle]
After the Civil War, there were numerous amendments that were passed in order to promote freedom of African Americans. Those include the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. These amendments granted freedom from slavery, the right to vote, and citizenship to African Americans. Unfortunately, when the dust settled, African Americans started to see that these freedoms that they were promised, were not actually held up. Many African Americans struggled to see the effects of these laws. Things like race riots, being blocked from voting, and lynching’s, just to name a few, led to an abundance of frustrations from African American’s. These growing frustrations eventually led to a famous movement known as the Civil
Some would say that it was after the Reconstruction, when southern whites regained control of the south. Once the southern whites regained control over the south [after the Civil War], they created laws, knows as Jim Crow Laws, that in essence stripped African Americans of the very freedoms that they were just promised in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment. These laws segregated blacks and whites in many different ways. African Americans were not allowed to go to eat at the same restaurants, drink from the same water fountains, or even live in the same housing as whites. “For Example, they imposed taxes and literacy tests in order to vote, forbade interracial marriages, prevented blacks from buying or renting property in white neighborhoods, and required blacks to attend separate schools and to sit in separate areas of restaurants and public transportation” (Jim Crow Laws. 2015) These Jim Crow Laws separated blacks and whites in all aspects of life. So, although the slaves were freed, African Americans still faced many
Each event drove the movement in a different direction. The first would be the murder of Emmett Till in 1954. Emmett Till, born in Chicago, was a 14-year-old boy who was lynched for allegedly making unwarranted remarks to a white woman, while visiting his family. When the woman’s husband got word about what had taken place in his absence, he felt threatened. The woman’s husband and his brother drove to Till’s family’s house intending to scare him. Their tactics were met by his cockiness. This infuriated the woman’s husband. He decided to make an example out of him, thus killing Emmett Till. His remains were sent back to Chicago so that his mother could identify and burry the body. She made the executive decision to have an open casket funeral so that she could raise awareness. When the case was brought to trial, the woman’s husband and brother were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white jury. Although, “testimony varies as to whether Till actually whistled at Mrs. Bryant” (Podesta 1994). “The Till lynching and trial was the first big racial story after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision…” (Podesta 1994). This brought together many African Americans, they boycott the Bryant-Miliman stores [Till’s murderers], which made them sell out soon