Why Is The Civil Rights Movement Successful

The United States has several different social groups, but some groups were seen as second class citizens in the past hundreds of years. African Americans experienced brutal treatments as slaves after being brought to the American society. Other minorities groups, including female and LGBTQs, had unequal opportunities in the society as well. As the society developed, civil rights policies, which are designed to improve the living conditions of minorities, were made into laws; however, not all civil rights policies were effectively in solving inequalities. The United States had made both successful and failed civil rights approaches. In testifying the outcomes of the past civil rights movements, activists could better understand what should
In the Civil Rights Movement, blacks actively fought for their rights. Non-violent protests spread across the nation. In May 1961, thirteen “Freedom Riders” took a bus from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, a city that was segregated, in order to testify the effectiveness of the Supreme Court decision that prohibited segregation in buses. Though they were attacked by whites, they were still able to maintain their actions and even triggered attempts across the country to fight against segregation. A significant number of people started to engage in direct actions against segregation. Two years later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a massive March on Washington to support President Kennedy for the passage of the Civil Rights Bill. The demonstration reached 200,000 people in number and gained national attentions by the Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (Krigger 278-279). Soon after the demonstration, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Freedom Riders and the March on Washington were successful because racial minorities were fighting for their own rights by themselves and dramatically raised people’s attentions toward racial inequalities. These movements let the voice of the oppressed be heard and inspired thousands of blacks and whites across the country to support social justice. Instead of waiting for the government to enforce the Court’s decision, Freedom Riders were enforcing
In the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and formally abolished the Jim Crow system, which was a racial caste system that discriminates against racial minorities (Krigger 280). Theoretically, racial inequality would no longer exist as the major segregative system was abandoned. Unfortunately, in retrospect to the past century, blacks and browns did not turn the tide against discriminations and enjoy the de facto racial equality. Michelle Alexander, the author of the New Jim Crow, argues that the United States did not actually ended the racial caste system; rather, it redesigned the system with the War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration (Alexander 8). The War on Drugs, according to Alexander, is intrinsically against blacks and browns. While blacks and whites have similar rates of using drugs, the overwhelming majority of drug “criminals” today are blacks. Much more blacks are in jail than did 50 years ago, when the Act was passed. In this regard, the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not successfully solve racial inequalities because blacks are still being segregated from the white society. There are two reasons why the Act failed. First, the Civil Rights Act made more and more people, including blacks and whites, tend to believe that racial inequality had ended. As the awareness of people toward the seriousness of racial inequality is low, it is almost impossible to