60's Civil Rights Movement

Introduction

The 1960s were one of the most significant decades in the twentieth century. The sixties were filled with new music, clothes, and an overall change in the way people acted, but most importantly it was a decade filled with civil rights movements. On February 1, 1960, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College in Greensboro went to a Woolworth's lunch counter and sat down politely and asked for service.

Discussion

The waitress refused to serve them and the students remained sitting there until the store closed for the night. The very next day they returned, this time with some more black students and even a few white ones. They were all well dressed, doing their homework, while crowds began to form outside the store. A columnist for the segregation minded Richmond News Leader wrote, Here were the colored students in coats, white shirts, and ties and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a rag tail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill, and some of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and honored flag of the Southern States in the last war fought by gentlemen. It gives one pause. As one can see, African-Americans didn't have it easy trying to gain their civil rights. Several Acts were passed in the 60's, such as Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. This was also, unfortunately, the time that the assassinations of important leaders took placed. The deaths of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all happened in the 60's.

From 1955 to 1965, boycotts, sit-ins, demonstrations, marches, and community organizing raised black peoples spirits and expectations, and greatly hurt legal segregation. The weeks that followed the Greensboro sit-in more; sit-ins occurred throughout the country. Thousands had taken place by the end of 1960 and many people had often gone to jail for it. The Kennedy Era, 1960 and 63, saw many important events. In 1961, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were the first African-Americans admitted into Wayne State University. The March on Washington, August 28, 1963, was a huge gathering of two hundred thousand people who gathered at the nation's capital to show their support for civil rights for blacks and hear Martin Luther King, Jr., speak. It was here that King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. It was the March on Washington that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Kennedy Era came to an abrupt halt with the result of his assassination on November 22, 1963.

With the death of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson took over the presidency and then was reelected in the next election of 1964. Johnson won the 64 election by a landslide. His plan was to extend black suffrage and pass the Civil Rights Act in memory of Kennedy. It was during the ...