In what ways did black Americans secure improved civil rights during the years 1945-63?

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Laura Keren

i) In what ways did black Americans secure improved civil rights during the years 1945-63?

ii) Why was there increased racial tension in the USA in the years 1964-70

i) Black Americans have tried to secure civil rights during 1945-63 in some very different ways with many different ideas and leaders. One way is legal action and another is peaceful protests. 

Legal changes- The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colured People worked to change laws like the Jim Crow laws of the south. This organisation brought many cases to the Supreme Court one of which was the important Brown v The Board of Education of Topeka. The organisation through which Oliver Brown, a black local sued the city school board for not allowing his eight year old daughter to go to the near by school, forcing her to go to study much further away. A year after this case ended the Supreme Court declared that all states with segregated education were to allow black students in to their all white schools, but in the southern states the law was often not accepted and there remained white only schools with no blacks because the south were so opposed to the blacks.

The first real test of this law enforcement was Little Rock where the main school was an all white school called Central High School. In 1957 the federal government ordered nine black students to enrol, but the state governor refused and was supported by the majority of the Little Rock’s white population and the whites who sympathised with the nine students were too scared to speak out. So the federal government sent 10,000 National guards and 1,000 paratroopers to ensure that the pupils got to school, and once in school they were accompanied wherever they went to protect them from harassment from other students for a whole year.

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        Peaceful protests-Another way blacks tried to secure civil rights was by peaceful protests, one of these protests was a bus boycott called the Montgomery bus boycott. It was started in 1955 by Rosa Parks, a black woman who travelled home from work by bus (which was segregated) and when all the white seats were taken up the black people on the bus were meant to get up for the white people to sit down, but on this Montgomery bus Rosa Parks refused to get up and so she was arrested. After the arrest, black people urged their leaders to do ...

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