What was civil rights movement

This was done by a phased plan of desegregation in Francis County , and Gould Lincoln County. Civil rights activism began to spread across the state. As SNCC moved deeper into the Arkansas Delta, which had larger black populations and greater racial tensions, white opposition became fiercer. One of the most important developments in the s was in voting rights. In , the passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the U. Constitution outlawed the use of the poll tax in federal elections.

In , Arkansas abolished the poll tax as a requirement for voting and introduced a permanent personal voter registration system. The Voting Rights Act further bolstered black voting rights by, among other measures, removing literacy tests as a voting qualification.

The earlier Civil Rights Act had outlawed unequal application of voter registration requirements. Winthrop Rockefeller successfully won election as the first Arkansas Republican governor since Reconstruction in , his campaign having actively courted black voters. Upon his reelection in , he won eighty-eight percent of the black vote.

The late s saw increasing radicalization of the civil rights movement and the emergence of black power. SNCC decided to remove white members from the organization in , soon leading to its collapse in Arkansas. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In August , eighty black citizens marched on the City Hall in Benton Saline County after the shooting of a black youth by a white restaurant owner. In August , the white owner of a grocery store in Blytheville Mississippi County shot and killed a black picketer, leading to major unrest there.

Francis County , Marianna Lee County , and Earle Crittenden County , demonstrations, shootings, and racial violence became part of the fabric of everyday life. By the early s, as black rebellion was subdued, attention began to shift back to implementing the gains of the civil rights movement and in particular the task of building political power in the state. In , Arkansas boasted ninety-nine black elected officials, the second-highest number of any Southern state.

Jerry Jewell , became the first black member of the Arkansas Senate. William Townsend became one of three black politicians elected to the Arkansas House of Representatives. Little Rock lawyer Perlesta A. Throughout the state, African Americans won elective offices as aldermen, mayors, justices of the peace, school board members, city councilors, city recorders, and city clerks. These gains further stimulated black voter registration.

By , ninety-four percent of black Arkansans of voting age were registered, the highest percentage of any state in the South. The task of translating black political power into day-to-day gains is ongoing. Black Arkansans collectively remain comparably worse off than whites in almost every category.

The ambiguity of gains made by civil rights struggles in the twentieth century is evident. Despite increased voter registration, Arkansas has yet to return a black congressperson to Washington DC. White population flight out of the Arkansas Delta, and out of built-up areas in towns and cities to sprawling suburbs, has led to increased geographical separation of the races. In Little Rock, millions of dollars of federal funds have been used to create a more geographically racially divided city.

During the s and s, 41, whites moved from east to west of the city, while 17, blacks moved—or were moved—in the opposite direction. The impact of the increasing geographical separation on the racial makeup of schools has been dramatic. For example, as the Little Rock School District sought to implement different plans for desegregation from the s onward, some voluntary, some by federal compulsion, the geographical divide between the races continually undercut their effectiveness.

When busing was introduced in the early s to counteract the effects of racially defined residential patterns, whites built private schools in the suburbs or fled the county altogether.

In , insurance and real estate man William F. From being a twenty-five-percent black minority district in , it had become a twenty-four-percent white minority district in In effect, there were no white students left to integrate. Although black Arkansans were undoubtedly better off at the turn of the twenty-first century than they were at the turn of the twentieth century, the struggle for civil rights, equality, and justice continues.

For additional information: Bates, Daisy. The Long Shadow of Little Rock. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, Cortner, Richard C. Middletown: University of Connecticut Press, Dillard, Tom. Gatewood, Willard B. Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, — Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Gipson, Maurice D.

Gordon, Fon Louise. Athens: University of Georgia Press, Graves, John William. Jones-Branch, Cherisse. Key, Barclay. Kilpatrick, Judith. Kirk, John A. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries.

Lewis, Catherine M. Richard Lewis, eds. Pierce, Michael. Riva, Sarah. Smith, C. Stockley, Grif. These celebrated words from the Brown v. Board of Education Majority Opinion ushered in an unprecedented era of civil rights and school restructuring in the United States.

In , when this judgment was written, not a single black student attended a majority white public school in the American South. In , Homer Plessy, an African-American man, refused to give up his seat to a white man on a train in New Orleans, as he was required to do by Louisiana state law. For this action he was arrested. Constitution, decided to fight his arrest in court. In , his case was presented to the United States Supreme Court.

By a vote of , the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy and similar cases, many people continued to press for the abolition of Jim Crow and other racially discriminatory laws.

In , five separate cases came before the U. District Court concerning the issue of segregation in public schools. These cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas , Briggs v. Elliot South Carolina , Davis v. Sharpe District of Columbia and Gebhart v. Ethel Delaware. While the facts of each case are different, the main issue in each was the constitutionality of state-sponsored segregation in public schools.

A three-judge panel at the U. District Court heard the cases and ruled in favor of the school boards. The plaintiffs then appealed to the U. Supreme Court. When the cases came before the Supreme Court in , the Court consolidated all five cases under the name of Brown v. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall personally argued the case before the Court. Unable to come to a solution by June the end of the Court's — term , the Court decided to rehear the case in December Finally, all of the Justices agreed to support a unanimous decision.

On May 17, , the Supreme Court delivered the unanimous ruling declaring state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.

The Act banned discrimination in public facilities including private companies offering public services like lunch counters, hotels and theaters; provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities and made employment discrimination illegal based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Board of Education in that school segregation was unconstitutional, in the s, in many communities in the United States, African American and white people were still segregated in schools, public transportation and restaurants. Discrimination prevented many African Americans from receiving equal consideration for employment and education. The Civil Rights Act of sought to legally prohibit and punish these injustices.

The road to passing the Civil Rights Act was a bumpy one. For decades after Reconstruction, Congress did not pass a single civil rights act. With protests throughout the south including one in Birmingham where police tried to suppress nonviolent demonstrators with dogs and fire hoses, President John F. Kennedy decided to act. In June , he proposed the most far reaching civil rights legislation to date, saying the U.

The House approved the bill with bipartisan support but when it moved to the Senate, a seventy-five day filibuster ensued. Finally, the Senate voted 73—27 in favor of the bill and President Johnson signed the bill into law on July 2, Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities.

Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders. We believe that all men are created equal. Yet many are denied equal treatment. Chinese Americans, especially during the McCarthy era, found themselves targets of suspicion and possible deportation following the Communist takeover of China. During this period, however, Asian Americans began their own social, cultural, and political initiatives to challenge the status quo and advance their civil rights.

During this time, the homophile movement grew and changed direction. Gays and lesbians in the "bar culture" engaged in various forms of resistance to police repression by insisting on their right to gather in public. In cities across the country, for example, working-class lesbian bars nurtured a world where women made public their same-sex desire. This cultural resistance, along with the formal political efforts of homophile organizations, laid the basis for the contemporary gay and lesbian movement.

African American mass demonstrations, televised racial violence, and the federally enforced desegregation of higher education institutions, as well as the black passive resistance movement of the early s led to adoption of the landmark Civil Rights Act of Considered the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in U. It prohibited tactics to limit voting; guaranteed racial and religious minorities equal access to public accommodations; outlawed job discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; continued the U.