Trace the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968. It was a hard time, and for many black persons, it seemed as if all broken promises of Reconstruction were finally, ironically epitomized in the actions of the Supreme Court of the United States. Ever since the 1870’s, the Court had been eviscerating the congressional legislation and constitutional amendments that had been established at the height of Reconstruction to protect some of the basic citizenship rights of black people. 1954 was a new time and more than tears and words were needed. Just about everyone that was black and alive at the time realized that the long, hard struggles, led by the NAACP, had forced the Supreme Court to take a major stand on the side of justice in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” A salvation of freedom was in the making, but the making proved difficult indeed. The next decade brought racial war to the South. The eleven years between the Brown decision in 1954 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 appeared to be a prolonged series of bloody conflicts and irrational white pig-headedness, with fiery protestations that the white south would never cave in.In December 1955, a mass movement that would change the system of segregation is sparked by Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks, tired after a long day’s work and tired of a lifetime of discrimination, was resting in her seat on the way home when several white men loaded on the bus, more than the existing white section could hold. The bus driver then yelled to the blacks, “Niggers, move back.” Rosa Parks refused to budge. The bus driver stopped the bus and had her arrested. Her case prompts JoAnn Robinson, and the Woman’s Political Council, along wi...
