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Rosa Parks and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott

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Rosa Parks and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott

HIST102 American History since 1877

The civil rights movement in the United States was a struggle against the racial discrimination and segregation the African Americans faced prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dating back nearly 100 years, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, black people in the South had been fighting for equality from the moment they were freed from slavery. There were many events that contributed to the civil rights movement. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was established in 1909. Jackie Robinson broke the color lines of Major League Baseball in 1947. In 1954 Congress overturned the Plessy vs Ferguson ruling, determining that segregated schools naturally unequal. In 1963 more than 200,000 blacks and whites marched to the nation’s capital to protest racism and hear Martin Luther King Jr’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed, forbidding racial discrimination in schools, employment, hotels, public transportation, etc. Following the Civil Rights Act was the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which was instrumental in the expansion of black voters. There were many more events that helped shape the development of the civil rights movement and in the following information will discuss one in particular: The 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913. She worked as a seamstress in a department store. She was also a dedicated civil rights activist. She was one of the first women to join the NAACP and worked as a secretary for E.D. Nixon, the vice president of the Montgomery NAACP chapter (Kohl, Rosa Parks, 15). She put a lot of effort into desegregating the schools of Alabama and was well known among the black leaders in Montgomery. On December 1,

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