Agony and the Ecstasy Civil Rights Movement
The Agony and the Ecstasy: The Civil Rights Movement Throughout its history the United States has wrestled with civil rights issues. ... ” These crises and struggles for civil rights in the United States culminate in the 1960s, producing the Civil Rights Movement. Although it is called “The Civil Rights Movement,” it is only a section of a greater American struggle for civil rights. This struggle occurred before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement, and it has impacted history through its events, its ideas, and its people. Before the Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s, its events unfolded against apathy and racism. At the end of the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery (Boyer, et al. ... ” The radical ideas of the Radical Republicans clashed with President Johnson’s envisionment of Reconstruction; whereas Johnson carried out a lenient plan to admit the South into the Union, Radical Republicans pushed for civil rights legislation. Congress passed The Civil Rights Act of 1866 against Johnson’s veto, granting U. ... Gaining momentum, Congress also passed the Fourteenth Amendment, making everyone born in the United States (or brought up in the United States) to be a citizen, and declaring “no state could abridge their rights without due process of law or deny them equal protection under the law (Boyer, et al. ... McKissack 57), and when Rutherford Hayes was elected, he retrieved all federal troops from the South, ending the Reconstruction era, and also ending the enforcement of civil rights (59-60). ... ” The NAACP has proved itself to be the nation’s top civil rights organization (Duncan 109) through many endeavors including anti-lynching campaigns (100), mass nonviolent protests, challenges of corrupt pay scales for black teachers (101), and the Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the head of which was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (102). From this era sprang the circumstances under which the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was born. The ideas before the Civil Rights Movement included racism and white supremacy, government apathy, and the will of African-Americans to rise from a slum of poverty and discrimination. ... The Ku Klux Klan, or KKK, was formed in 1866 by six Confederate generals; its message today is essentially that “non-whites have no constitutional rights (“Who Are the White Camellia Knights? ... Moving to government apathy, after Grant was elected to office, there was a general retreat of the Republican party, the main support for civil rights in Reconstruction (Boyer et al. ... One of the key ideas before the Civil Rights Movement was that of the innocence and even necessity of segregation, embodied in Plessy vs. ... The people from before the Civil Rights Movement were widely variegated in their beliefs and contributed to the turmoil that gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement. Abraham Lincoln brought the nation out of civil war; Booker T. ... 324)”; Thurgood Marshall headed the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP; the founders of the Ku Klux Klan sparked a group of racism and terrorism; and many others contributed to the Civil Rights Movement before it even began. The Civil Rights Movement began around the Brown vs. ... King silenced the civil rights leader that appealed to the most (Duncan 122). The African-Americans were not the only ones in need of civil rights, either; Hispanic truants in California were sent to the fields instead of back to school (Anderson ), and one judge is reported as saying, “[Mexican people] are lower than animals and haven’t the right to live in organized society .