Civil+Rights+-R-IZZLE.

Civil Rights.

After World War II, African Americans and other civil rights supporters challenged segregation in the United States. What some of these African Americans thought was just simple acts to slowly start integrating the country landed them jail time or sometimes death. Thurgood Marshall was the chief counsel and director of its Legal Defense and Education Fund of the NAACP. He focused on ending segregation in public schools. The Supreme Court saw many cases on segregation in schools, one of which was the case of Linda Brown, who wasn't allowed to go to her neighborhood school because she was black. With the help of the NAACP segregation was not allowed in schools. Rosa Parks was one of the very many well known African Americans who stood up for their race. Something so simple as not giving up your bus seat to a white man went a long way. Although she was arrested, news of her arrest reached E. D. Nixon, who was a former president of the NAACP they decided to take her case to the courts. While blacks in Montgomery began boycotting the buses and protesting, They elected Martin Luther King, Jr., to lead them in the bus boycott. King at the time was a pastor and believed that the only way they would win was through nonviolent passive resistance. The boycotting lasted for over a year, they organized car pools or walked instead of riding hte buses. Rosa Parks's case worked its way through the courts and on November 1956, the Supreme Court affirmed the decision declaring Alabama's laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional.

On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. It gave the federal government board power to prevent racial discrimination in a number of areas. The law made segregation illegal in most places of public accommodation, and it gave citizens of all races and nationalities equal access to public facilities. It gave the U.S. attorney general more power to bring lawsuits to force school desegregation and required private employers to end discrimination in the workplace and put a ban on all types of job discrimination. A year later the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came into play. It authorized the U.S. attorney general to send federal examiners to register qualified voters. It suspended discriminatory devices, such as literacy tests, in counties where less than half of all adults had been allowed to vote. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. played a huge role in the passing of these acts. The support, protests, and speeches, gave the African American community hope.

Even though the African Americans began gaining more and more rights, they still were given the same treatments from others, prejudice or discrimination was still common. It was going to have to take a lot more than the changing of the law to change people's attitudes. Five days after Pres. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a riot broke out in Watts, Los Angeles. Allegations of police brutality was the reason the whole riot broke out in the first place. The Watts Riot was so huge it lasted for six days and required over 14,000 members of the National Guard and 1,500 law officers to restore order. Entire neighborhoods had been burned and $45 million of property had been destroyed.

Many people began to turn away from King. Some found their own ways to do things and many of the young African Americans called for black power, a term that had many meanings. A few thought black power meant that physical self-defense and even violence were acceptable- a clear rejection of Dr. King's philosophy. Others, including Stokely Carmichael, the leader of SNCC, thought the term meant that African Americans should control the social, political, and economic direction of their struggle. Black power stressed pride in the African American cultural group. African Americans started taking pride in their heritage by adopting new hairstyles and clothings.