The Civil Rights Movement In The 1940s And 1960s

“If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” This was a perfect quote to describe the feeling of thousands of African Americans During the 1940s and 1960s. In the 1940s after decades of sporadic protests and riots, there would be an official organization with an official name, the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights Movement was a movement that had been in progress for a multitude of years and generations. The fight for equal rights would cause the African American community great torment because of the hundreds of arrests, beatings and murders of their community. Although these brutal events would fuel the fire of determination to receive equal rights that whites have. The Civil Rights movement would consist of a new defined organization,
The first steps seen to accomplish these goals was to eliminate segregation through the dismemberment of the Plessey Vs. Ferguson trial that required segregation in the south. Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement would try to take a new approach of Non-violence. This strategy became useful because much of the movement’s actions were being broadcasted across the country on television. Prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. believed in the idea of peaceful protests. However many of these protests would be met with violence from the opposing police officers and white citizens. The idea to show a peaceful front that was met with cruel violence, such as being hosed down, showed the public the injustice that African Americans were facing. One of the major events show casing this was the protests in Birmingham Alabama. Led by King Jr., the new face of the movement consisted of boycotts, sit-ins, and marches. Another strategy that was use was involving children in such protests. However, officers would try to prevent these protests, and would pull out all stops to keep protestors at bay. In one such instance student had gathered, once more, and started to march towards the town center, police officers told them to stop, but students kept marching on. Officers then hooked up fire hoses that were “set as a level that would peel bark off a tree, or separate bricks from mortar” and started to hose down the protesters with such force it would “rip shirts off boys backs, and push young women over the tops of cars.” The images and videos of the cruelty that the officers showed African Americans caused white Americans all across the country to become sympathetic to what people of color were fighting for. Although, while a majority of the black community believed in peaceful protests to achieve their