The Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement that began in 1950 was an fire to address the state of inequality that had existed in pitch-black and White America since the nations conception. The Movement began as a demand to get payment on a promise too long delayed, as noted by the efforts leader Martin Luther King Jr. , for Black equality, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The early Civil Rights movement focused on integration as achieved with legal means such as in the Brown v. Board of Education case.This case was successfully appealed to the Warren Court on behalf of Lisa Brown, a young Black student, and argued by Thurgood Marshall, who was later to sit on the bench as a Supreme Court justness himself, after demanded integration in public education. (Cozzens, Brown versus Board of Education, 1998) The movement also was articulated through early acts of civil disobedience such as the attempt to protest the lynching of Emmett Till, a thirteen-year-old Union boy lynched for murdering a Wh ite woman. Cozzens, Emmett Till, 1998)In assessing whether the goals of the movement were met, it must be noted that it would have been inconceivable in the 1950s that a Black woman would be a Secretary of State, as is the case nowadays, or could have won the Noble Prize like Toni Morrison. Martin Luther King Jr. is not only a respected figure, but gives his presence to a national holiday.Yet despite the gains of the previous decades, there free the Great Compromiser an economic and educational gap between Black America and White America that integration through legal or political demonstrations has not been able to heal. Lynching as a rough-cut practice has been brought to rest, perhaps, but tensions exist all over the nation between Black Americans and what is often an all-White constabulary force. America appears more integrated today, and laws allow for any(prenominal) methods of historical redress like affirmative action. exclusively the sense that this still remains ina dequate, despite the successes of prominent African Americans on an individual level, has caused many Blacks today to study the more radical, or culturally focused members of the early movement, such as Malcolm X, and to question whether some form of cultural rehabilitation of Black culture is necessary to undo the still-lasting legacy discrimination has wrought.And finally, the casing of the failed relief effort of Hurricane Katrina to the largely all Black residents whose neighborhoods were destroyed showed the nation how deep the poverty remains in the nation in many impoverished areas that are segregated in fact, if not in law.