Civil Rights Movement
...ustice, focusing on the Mississippi and Emit Till Case, which were both important incidences that set off the Civil Rights Movement in the direction of the south. Emit Till was an innocent teenager that was accused to talking to white woman and was killed brutally for it. Blacks were getting murdered and society was not taking it seriously, blacks were to stay in there places and let justice be served. African Americans knew that justice was not being served so they took matters into there own hands. African Americans would not speak out because, “Violence had been long used in the South as a means of intimidating blacks into passivity,” (45).Following the Mississippi misfortunes and the Emit Till Case, Martin Luther King was introduced to the south and soon became a key activist in the Civil Rights Movement. Chapter three, We’re Not Moving to the Back. Mr. Blake was about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Again Martin Luther King was the key leader in guiding the people in the direction of the boycotts, but it was the people of Montgomery that made the boycott a success. Chapter four, Hall Monitors from the 101st: The Little Rock Story is a story the America is all to familiar with, even after schools were desegregated, students had to be escorted to classes by the National Guards because whites did not approve of the integration in schools even after the laws were passed for desegregating schools. Chapter five, Down Freedom’s Main Line: The Movement’s Next Generation was a wake up call to the younger generations that were fortunate enough to obtain an education past high school. College students were conducting sit-ins in department store restaurants, within these sit-ins Juan Williams was also a part of them. He remembers being approached by another college student and Williams being eager to take part in history that he knew would make a difference. Chapter six, Freedom in the Air was about the outcomes of the Albany and Birmingham movements, and the success of the groups that were developed throughout the movements in the south. Also a portion of the letter from a Birmingham Jail that Martin Luther King wrote when imprisoned is part of this chapter, and the importance of the non-violence is emphasized in the letter along with the true feeling of discrimination towards the African American community and the changes that need to be made. Chapter seven, The March to Washington was just that, the march that Martin Luther King Jr. led through the Washington D.C., and his famous “I have a dream speech,” was first read. Chapter eight, Mississippi: Mississippi was the capital of the Civil Rights Movement, a lot of racially discriminating occurrences had originated from there. This chapter focuses on NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers and Kennedy’s assassination. This price of freedom that they had to pay for was there lives, and the emphasis of freedom not being free is emphasized in there deaths. Chapter nine, Selma, focuses on the children and the influence they made on the movement. They were eager to get out and help there parents; Children ranging from age six to there early teens were marching, and missing school to let there voice be heard. They marched though the streets and were thrown in jail and media coverage came from all over the nation to cover the stories of the children. King knew exactly what he was doing by involving the children, and the outcome was successful, and the children were of course the future, again relying back to the beginning of the book, God Bless the Children. Research through documents, interviews, books, newspapers as well as other articles did a great deal in the success of Eyes on the Prize. The individual attention that each interviewee was given when written in the book, displays the passion that these interviewees had about the Civil Rights Movement and the way it was integrated into the text fit well with the rest of the chapter. Alongside the personal interviews, Williams own experiences were another successful sources of the success of Eyes on the Prize. The personal touch that was included with the introduction by Julian Bond about Williams’s involvement in the sit-ins illustrated a respect for Williams in the view of the readers. Not only did he participate in the movement, he also later on went to research and write about it, to clearly exemplify what many African Americans went though in America at this time. Past the text books that are usually available in classrooms. Eyes on the Prize’s easy readability was a great tactic that Williams incorporated when writing this book. Not only college students, but high school students as well as adults with all different educational backgrounds are able to pick up this book and enjoy it with...