To understand civil rights as they are today, it’s important to know as much as you can about the civil rights movement. This was a struggle for rights for everyone as we know it today and it greatly impacted the civil rights laws that we have still today. This wasn’t so much a battle over race, as many people might believe, but was in fact, a struggle to improve decency among human beings and to state legally that all human beings truly are created equal and should be treated as such.
The civil rights movement was years in the making but really came to a head in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat n a bus. That same year, Emmitt Till was hung in the south because he whistled at a white woman. These were two separate incidents that created outrage in the people and boycotts began to happen with people of all races who didn’t believe that this discrimination was just.
These two events brought the views of the civil rights movement to national television and more and more people joined the cause. This is a very important milestone in American history because the United States could not proper claim to be a great and free nation when all of its citizens were not given the proper human rights. Equal rights would need to be awarded to everyone who was a citizen of the country and before the Civil Rights movement, this was not the case.
A person of the United States would need to have equal rights to all privileges, such as the right to vote. In the south, there were places where blacks were not allowed to enter and they would have to ride in a different section on public transportation or not allowed on public transportation at all. These were the types of civil rights violations that the civil rights movement sought to stamp out.
Because of these errors that were set in place in society, a new set of leaders came from both the religious and political bodies who set out to change these problems and create a better future for all of America. President Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr. both worked to create equality in all people and set in place laws and regulations that we still practice today. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to put these regulations into place in a legal standpoint and that has continued to grow even to today.
