Do you agree that Martin Luther King was the most important factor in helping Black Americans gain more Civil Rights in the 1960's? Explain your answer.

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Do you agree that Martin Luther King was the most important factor in helping Black Americans gain more Civil Rights in the 1960’s? Explain your answer.

In this essay I am going to out line the problems for Black Americans and why they wanted to gain civil rights. I am also going to write about what they achieved and how they gained the civil rights, what and who were the biggest factors in the fight for Blacks American’s freedom. This essay is to find out if Martin Luther King was the biggest factor in helping Blacks gain civil rights or was he just one of many.

The White Americans did not look at Black Americans as Americans. They were looked upon, as black people who did not deserve a life or a chance to become anything other than what they were originally brought to America for, slavery. White Americans treated black people with no respect, as if they were animals. Blacks were beaten to death and murdered and they realized that they deserved what white people had, civil rights. The right to be paid for their work, the right to and education, the right to live in a home with a family and not be owned as if they were property.

This is when black people took every chance to be recognized as human and tried to gain civil rights. Black people did not want to fight; they wanted to peacefully gain respect. When black people started to stand up for themselves whites were outraged and had them thrown in jail. Many blacks were lynched by the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) or angry white people, hung in trees, shot or burnt. Blacks were so use to threats as a part of every day life that they soon kept quiet in fear of their lives.


In WW2 Black Americans saw this as their chance to gain civil rights, and prove they were just as good as the white man. At first the armed forces did not want to accept blacks into the armed forces. Blacks were not aloud to be pilots in the air forces; they were not aloud in the navy.
They thought that if they fought for their country they would get the rights they had be asking for, civil rights and the right to vote. Over 1 million blacks joined the armed forces and they were put in black only units with white officers. Blacks were welcomed into the army but kept separate from the whites, they had different wards and if they were shot they would be left for dead unless a black nurse came to save them and whites would rather die than have black man save them. Black women were used as nurses and could only help the blacks. White and Blacks were still very separate and whites still very racist. Blacks were used for many things in the army, the cooked and cleaned, drove transport and were used as labourers. In 1944 blacks were aloud to combat in the U.S. marines. By then there were also hundreds of black officers and they fought in combat units. Some women became officers.
When blood transfusions were made black and white blood could not be mixed for fear of infection.



Black soldiers hoped that everything would be different after the war, that because they had fought for their country they would be recognized as Americans and have the right to vote and they would gain civil rights. The war helped bring an end to segregation and black people now had more opportunities. President Roosevelt was under pressure from Britain as they found it strange that the U.S. had two separate armies and so Roosevelt banned discrimination in any company that used war equipment.



The Civil Rights Movement was at a peak from 1955-1965. The Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, guaranteeing basic civil rights for all Americans, regardless of race, after nearly a decade of non-violent protests and marches, ranging from the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott to the student-led sit-ins of the 1960s to the huge March on Washington in 1963



In the first half of this century like many other southern cities Montgomery in Alabama, was strictly segregated. It was this time that Rosa Parks grown up. Rosa Parks mother was a schoolteacher, and she taught Rosa until the age of eleven, when she went to Montgomery Industrial School for Girls. Rosa obeyed the segregation laws even though she found them humiliating. At twenty she became a member of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) and worked as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP Board.  In 1955 Rosa Parks protested against segregation in her own way. Rosa Parks avoided travelling by bus; she liked to walk home from work when she wasn’t too tired. The buses reminded her of segregation to any black passengers. The front four rows were reserved for whites only and remained empty even when there were not enough white passengers to fill them. The back section was for black passengers. If the white section was full, black passengers in the middle section had to leave their seats, a row had to be left, even if only one white person needed to sit. On December 1st, 1955 Rosa Parks decided to take the bus because she was feeling tired after working as a seamstress in a department store. She sat in the middle section, when a white man boarded the bus and demanded she moved because the white section was full. The others black Americans in the row moved to the back of the bus, but Rosa Parks refused to move. Angry that she wouldn’t move the white bus driver threatened to call the police unless Rosa moved of her seat and gave it to the white man. Rosa did not care. By the time the police arrived the bus driver insisted on arrest. Rosa was arrested and jailed. She contacted a NAACP lawyer who arranged for her to be released on bail.



February 1st 1960, four black college students sat down at a "white-only" department store lunch. The restaurant refused to serve the students but the students stayed seated until the store closed in the evening. The students went back every day to occupy the lunch counter, joined by a group of protesters that grew to the hundreds. Faced by angry white people and the management that refused to serve them, the students stayed to protest until the store was forced to close its doors.
The protest marked the beginning of sit-ins led by Black American students against the segregated public places of the South. Black Americans and protest groups of students would sit down in segregated places and refuse to move until they were served or removed by force. By the end of 1960, nearly 70,000 black students were participating in a sit-in or March to support the demonstrators.





There had been a few sit-ins before 1960; the sit-in mass movement in 1960 was new. Blacks in the poor community of the South did not wanted to do these sorts of protests, as they feared losing their jobs because of and arrest. In 1960, as Black American students entered the politics in large amounts for the first time, civil rights protesting began to change. Non-violence was not just a strategy, although it did get sympathy from many whites.
During 1960 sit-ins broke down the segregation of the South, and lunch counters were de-segregated in cities in Texas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.



Boycotters, both black and white people were supporting the protesters, many bus companies did not want to lose the revenue of customers.
In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, there were more whites in the community and local government. Cities such as Montgomery, Alabama, made the demonstrations illegal, white storeowners refused to serve blacks, as it was their own private property.
Throughout the South, protesters faced arrest and violence as police and the Ku Klux Klan worked together to stop the protests. By the end of 1960, 36,000 students had been arrested and thousands were expelled from college.

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With support from Black American activist Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), students made a permanent organization in 1960, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The way of occupying a place as a means of non-violent protest got priority in the Civil Rights Movement. Sit-ins at lunch counters inspired other similar types of protesting at different segregated places, such as swimming places.
The non-violent resistance was one of the most important factors of the 1960 sit-in protests. Segregation was seen to be a moral as well as a legal issue.

Martin Luther King

1929 Born ...

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