The war ended (it should be noted that this war was fighting racism, and that Americans so not understand irony). When the black troops arrived back, they bought the open-minded views of race they had seen in Europe and especially Britain. They decided that they were and improvement on the ones in use in the Former Confederate States of America weren’t, an organisation was set up to prove this point; National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples or NAACP.
This association started to grow, due to the new opinions of former troops. With the increase of members came the increase of funds (from the joining fees) and the organisation spread through out the south and the entire county. Thus the backbone of civil rights movement was formed. Although it wasn’t just the troops that made up the NAACP, it was the ordinary people of the south.
In 1955 a black woman, a mother and a housekeeper (who just so happened to work for the NAACP) became the world’s most famous female political activist since Emilie Pankhurst. In Montgomery, Alabama, USA, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white man. She was arrested for breaking the segregation laws and put in a jail for a week, refusing to pay the fine of $10, preferring to pay her time and defy a law she disagreed with than pay a fine and admitting defeat. The proverbial ball began to roll. The local community rallied round Rosa, agreeing with her all the way, and the local pastor went to support one of his lost lambs in her time of need, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Under King’s leadership, the entire black community of Montgomery boycotted the bus services; they used their combined economical power to send the bus company to near bankruptcy. In 1956 the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation illegal. The first battle been won. A boycott on this scale in a city this size would be expected to draw a lot of media attention, and it did, all over the nation and the world, mass media played a vital role in the Civil Rights Movement, effectively advertising the cause to the entire planet. But media played its part in every far-flung battle of the civil right movement, as far-flung as, lets say, Arkansas.
A year later in the state of Arkansas, not that far away from Alabama, was a school. This school was the major high school of Little Rock, and the school was of the same name. Little Rock High School desegregated its self in 1957 for the new semester in September, to allow black students to enrol. At the time the state governor was one Faubus and a devout racist, he opposed the move made by the school, along with the vast majority of the white population, and send out the national guard to stop the thirty or so black students to attend the school. Gradually, the number of students whittled down to nine, due to the threats of violence and death bestowed on them by the white community. Only nine remained and we’re still determined to go to school. The story, again through the media, reached every corner of the globe, including America’s capital, Washington. In an oddly shaped office in an oddly coloured house, the President was under increasing pressure to take action, he didn’t like what he saw happening in Little Rock and dispatched the one hundred and first airborne division (by road, completely contradicting it’s existence) to assist these nine pupils in attending their classes. That’s (roughly) 111-armed servicemen to one person, obviously they needed a lot of protecting. The media has stirred up every racist in Little Rock, from the slums to the suburbs, to come and protest about the pupils’ attendance. The media is a very powerful thing. The main question here is why did the President send in the troops? Was it his opinion, was he forced under the pressure applied by the Civil Right Movement, to stop a civil incident (i.e. another war) o simply he was embarrassed in the global community (remember, this was at the height of the cold war.)
These were the main events in the civil rights movement, the were shared with the world through media, through America by the NAACP and later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference established by Dr King, and through Montgomery by rousing speeches made by the same man. The growth of the Civil Rights Movement In America in the 1950’s was spread and owns its expansion, like all things, to large-scale awareness.
Adam Rivers
