How The Sit-In Aided The Civil Rights Movement

Martin Luther King Jr. once said that, “there is no noise as powerful as the sound of the marching feet of determined people.” During the civil rights movement, African Americans were determined to gain equal rights and would not quit until that goal was reached. Many Southern states still enforced a brutal legal system known as Jim Crows laws that pushed African Americans into a second class status. African Americans intense dedication was necessary to achieve equal opportunity in housing, education, employment, the access to public facilities, and the right to vote. Events such as the Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the sit-in aided the civil rights movement to gain ground in the United States. Brown v. Board of Education was a civil rights case on May 17, 1954 in Topeka Kansas. There was an argument over segregated public schools violating the fourteenth amendment and ruled unconstitutional. In the section titled The Court Strikes Down on Segregated Schools, Emily Lapsansky-Werner
Four African American students walked up to a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina and sat patiently until provided service. Despite the violence projected onto the students, they sat quietly and waited to receive the same service as everyone else. Some places decided to even shut down completely instead of integrating. The sit-ins not only worked, but they assembled tens of thousands of people to come together in a series of nonviolent but adversarial actions. Sanford Wexler discusses in The Civil Rights Movement how, “their sit-in, a form of nonviolent direct action, set in motion the student phase of the civil rights movement” (The Sit-ins and Freedom Rides 109). Events such as this allowed for the civil rights movement to gain ground in the United States by bringing together African Americans and nonviolently fighting against the cruel inequality of their everyday