Civil Rights Movement

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Bruno Crosier

“The Civil Rights Movement Achieved a Great Deal. Do Sources A-F Prove this Correct?”

        The Civil Rights Movement was a movement aimed at abolishing racial discrimination in the United States of America in the 1950s and 1960s. Many things were achieved by the movement, and I will be looking at both its successes and its failures.

        Historically, the black population has always been subject to racial injustice; the most notable example being the introduction of the slave trade. For over two centuries, Africans were treated like animals and lived their lifes in unjust conditions. It had been less than 100 years since slaves living in the Southern States of America had been freed, and this meant there were still very obvious social impacts.

        The moderate white southern American would see the black man as nothing more than an inconvinience, both socially and economically. They felt threatened by the fact that the people they had grown up being told was inferior to them had now begun to take their jobs, earn money and go to the same school as them. So it comes as little surprise that when the segregation of schools became unconstitutional in 1954 many white southerners were outraged.

        Source A shows the amount of black children attending school with white children from 1956 – 1962. It does show an increase, however I think it would be wrong to call this a success. This is because the margin by which it has increased is simply tiny. The table shows us that less than 1% of the schools had black children in it. A success would mean equality, thus a much more even mix.

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        Source B also backs up this point. It is a photograph taken on the 23rd of September – three years after the Brown vs Board of Education case deemed the segregation of schools unconstitutional. Yet it shows a horrifying image of a black student on her way to enrol at an all-white school in Arkansas, with a young white woman screaming at her from behind. The fact that the source was taken in Arkansas is not very surprising – as it was here that much of the black population lived, and the white southern Americans held typically more extreme views than ...

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