The Civil Right Movement Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Civil Right Movement - Essay Example In this respect the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the interwar period up to the late 1960s is characterized to be decisive in the democratic flow for the rights of African Americans. First of all, the origins of the Civil Rights Movement development start from the transatlantic slavery period when there was no mention of equality in rights and democratic development due to the economic controversy. Black people were highly oppressed in this case. Thus, it was consistent that such a situation could not go any further, especially when the Civil War gave no extrinsic results in the field of civil rights and freedoms. It is possible to start from Booker T. Washington who reinforced the movement against white oppression and in terms of the letter of the Constitution he amplified in his numerous speeches. As a former slave, he first refused to comply with s second-class citizenship.1Thus, along with his extremist attitude toward accepting inferior status of Blacks against the w hite majority, he was both criticized and appreciated in masses. He is especially compared to the figure of Malcolm X in his struggle against white oppression. Nevertheless, the movement pursued toward the need for equal standards of living, since African Americans were concentrated in ghettos. Disfranchisement was extremely evident between two wars, and it gave grounds for a group of Black leaders to gain momentum of the Civil Rights movement. In fact, W.E.B. Du Bois was another luminary of the movement who was the first Harvard-trained Black intellectual at the time.2 His contribution was in a rational suggestion on how race issues should be reconsidered notwithstanding disfranchisement and impediments of the law. Looking at the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, he sought to keep on moving against segregation in education as a prerequisite for segregated life in the near future.3 The apogee of the Civil Rights Movement development takes place with the activity of Dr. Martin Luther King and his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail and the speech I Have a Dream aimed at uniting African Americans in their need for equality by means of peaceful and religiously-determined ways. Along with the NAACP, Luther King strived to battle for open housing in cities around the United States.4 It was a holistic demarche against the unwillingness of the majority to come up with a new deal on the Black issue. As a matter of fact, the battle was sequential in events and persistent in the overall desire for freedom in human and civil rights. The main aim of the NAACP headed and impacted by Du Bois and Luther King was the idea of desegregation after the period of the Great Migration.5 It was an obligatory demand of all African Americans considered to have quite less opportunities in contrast to the majority. In fact, mass arrests, the bus boycott, activity of Ku Klux Klan, - all these events provoked Blacks to stand up for their rights and state of social equilibrium g ained through the even distribution of civil rights among the white majority and the black minority. On the other hand, the main leaders of the movement followed their own philosophy. In this respect Malcolm X was devoted to the idea of the superiority of Islam among Afro-Americans as a stronger religion to fight for civil rights.6 Booker T. Washington amplified the pivotal significance of the predominant economical self-reliance over the political equality.7 As it has been