Timeline of The Civil Rights Movement

In the 1950’s, black people were protesting for their civil rights, because of the “Plessy vs. Ferguson” case in 1896. In this case, the term “separate but equal” was put into effect. This meant segregation between blacks and whites could happen legally. Due to “Plessy vs. Ferguson” case, the “Jim Crow” laws were firmly cemented by the highest court. These laws called for racial segregation and discrimination throughout the United States, during the late 1800’s through to the 1960’s.

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This group was in response to cruel discrimination to African Americans and fought to earn civil rights. Civil Rights are rights that were founded from the 13th and 14th amendments of the U.S. constitution. When these rights are present they usually correspond to a minority or ethnic group rather than a whole nation of people. In this case, the minority group allocated is the African-Americans. The NAACP was a founding campaign to stress the importance of equal rights to mainly african americans due to hardship, repression, and ancestral abuse from the birth of this nation, America.

From the early 1940s to the late 1960s the civil rights movement in America took on the many racial injustices faced by black people. It represented the battle for social, economic, and political freedoms; which were denied by the Jim Crow laws which were viciously supported in the south by whites. These laws were enacted from as far back as in 1876 and reinforced the idea of “equal but separate” in the landmark Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The majority of the justices argued that, “as long as racially separate facilities were equal they did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection of the law” ("Separate but Equal: The Plessy v. Ferguson Case"). This philosophy of racial segregation as Aldon Morris points out , “was the linchpin of Jim Crow” he also adds that, “following slavery [Jim Crow laws] became the new form of white domination, which insured Blacks would remain oppressed well into the twentieth century” (518).

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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded to fight for the rights of blacks, and black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois pushed the agenda. Black nationalist Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s efforts also reflected the agenda and helped to inspire racial pride among working class blacks in the 1920s. This decade would bear witness to the long struggle against political disenfranchisement in the South and a change from traditional black political alignments in the North. Feminists too, having achieved victory in their campaign for suffrage, still faced more subtle obstacles on their road to equality.