How Did The Grassroots Movement Affect The Civil Rights Movement

The grassroots struggle in Mississippi focused mainly on the transitioning of voting rights for blacks. To better understand the civil rights movement, it is very important to take in all accounts that played vital roles in it. The sources written in the text really focused on the problems that blacks were facing and the different groups that emerged to help them throughout their continuing struggle. Although groups of people were working towards a solution, there will always be a continuous fight for civil rights due to the diversity of our nation and the unwillingness to accept it. “For Racism to die a totally different america must be born” (pg. 279)

The murder of Emmett Till was the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi. Blacks were being tried and convicted of crimes that they did not commit. Whites were also causing issues between the two races and not being punished for it, instead blacks were. Due to the fact that blacks wanted to register for their right to vote, whites were angered and took their anger out in aggression and violence. White southerners did not believe that blacks actually wanted the right to vote, and thus made excuses up for them as to why they couldn’t. The freedom vote was put into place to insure that the blacks did not want to
What the SNCC did was organized grassroots efforts throughout the south. The SNCC was firm believer in political black power, black people coming together to elect representatives, and was a key organization in which provided efforts towards registering black voters in Mississippi. The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) was set up by the SNCC, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) with hopes to grant blacks their voting rights. In 1964, the COFO registered more than half a million black voters, however this hardly included