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Civil Rights Movement Background

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The Civil Rights Movement
History and background of the Movement
Before we can begin to discuss the civil rights movement of the 1960s, we must first discuss what led to the movement in the first place. In 1896, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice Henry Billings Brown found that, “the laws requirement that the accommodations be “equal but separate” met the constitutional standard”, he was talking about the segregation of passengers on the railroads (Hoffer, 2014). The decision of this case made it clear that states could continue to segregate public places using racial categorization. This means that schools, hospitals, restaurants, churches, bathrooms, and many more public places were segregated, and although the establishments were …show more content…
He brought his followers together and made it known to them that this was an important cause to pursue and fight for. This is when, “a civil rights movement was born that transformed the nation” (Auerbach, 2005). Some of the organizations that were formed during these times were, the NAACP, SNCC, CORE; who sponsored the freedom rides, Black Panther Party, and so many more. All of these organizations were formed because African Americans were not being treated fairly, they did not have the same rights as whites, and they did not have the same freedoms. By forming the civil rights movement, their end goal was to have racial equality, equal rights, and …show more content…
CORE wanted a group of individuals to ride on public transportation buses and challenge the segregation of these buses. They went into the deep south in order to try and accomplish this feat and they were going to try to travel through several southern states to reach their final destination, New Orleans, Louisiana. These individuals went through so much, they “endured mob violence, severe beatings, and imprisonment” (El Assaad, 2014). It was so bad that the original group that started the journey ended up backing out because there was so much violence that they were unprepared for. So, in came another group that had experience with such violence and they knew how to take the beatings and violence and not fight back. They did not make it to New Orleans as they had planned, but as El Assaad says in Remembering the Freedom Riders: An Interview with the Honorable Ernst H. Rosenberger, it was a, “A journey that ultimately changed the course of history” (El Assaad,

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