Segregation In The 1960's

Before the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, freedom for the citizens of the United States of America was treated as equal but separate through race. Even though both black Americans and white Americans both retained the freedoms that were bestowed to them by the Constitution those freedoms were attained in a segregated manner. Examples of such cases of segregation can be seen in the social freedoms of education and public services, where black only and white only schools exist and public places were segregated by entering different doors, drinking from different fountains, and segregated seating on public transportation. Segregation did not create equality in freedom rather it created a chasm in social equality, where “white” freedom was more privileged than “black” freedom. When these segregated freedoms began to be
On the evening of her arrest Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the people of Montgomery, Alabama on behalf of black Americans and in his address he stated that “first and foremost we are American citizens and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullest of the means” and that Rosa Parks was “not one of the finest Negro citizens but one of the finest citizens in Montgomery”. In the later statement Martin Luther King Jr. points to the term American citizen he does not use the term to point to differences in race but rather as one inclusive term and continues to do so by first calling Rosa Parks a Negro citizen but then corrects the statement by saying she is “the finest citizen”. Throughout the rest of the speech he does not point to Rosa Parks as being a black person but just as being “a fine person”. By consistently removing the idea of race from Rosa Parks he is showing that black Americans want to remove the idea of race from freedom and that freedom should be an inclusive and equal right (Foner