Leading Up to the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's

The traditional belief that the civil right movement began with Brown v. Broad of Educations in 1954 and ended during the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is an incomplete idea because it neglects to include the previous attempted by African Americans to secure basic civil liberties. Voting rights, adequate housing, and economic stability were actively pursued long before Brown. The start of the 20th century civil rights movement traces as far back as the 1930s. During the 1930s, African American fought in the Labor movement which helped influence the civil rights movement during 1950s and 1960s. During the 1930s the United States government under the FDR administration implemented a series of federal subsidies to help take the burden caused by the Great Depression away from the American public. These federal subsides known as the New Deal were radical because the U.S. government acknowledged that states and the federal government had a responsibility to people of America, and that the economic failures of Americans was not solely their fault but because of the inefficiencies of the capitalist system. Although the New Deal was created to help Americans it only helped a fraction of U.S. citizens. African Americans were mostly excluded from the benefits of the New Deal and many considered it a raw deal.

The New Deal was considered a raw deal because every aspect of the New Deal was subject to racial discrimination. The Agricultural Adjustment Act which was supposed to help sharecroppers, who were predominately black, receive assistance in return for growing less and mass producing less crops was of no help to the sharecroppers. The grant money from the government was giving to the landowners, who were predominately white, instead of the...

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...h. These schools helped blacks learn to read while developing radical new forms of adult teaching methods to better serve black communities. Highlander workshops would also produce great civil rights leaders like Rosa Parks.

The civil right movement of the 1960s was not just a spontaneous event of blacks rising against social and political injustice, but a culmination of different generation of blacks from the 1930s onwards working step by step to secure rights for African Americans. The 30s black labor movement and the rise of the black working class educated future African Americans in how to organize and work to change the system. The black veterans and black female activists from the 40s perfected the tools for the future generations of the late 50s and the 60s to take the helm and unify the African Americans in the fight for their rightful place in America.