Tea Party

Writing Response #2

Andres Molina

May 12, 2015

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is generally viewed in the U.S. as a heroic period in American History. The movement has been widely interpreted today as ending the last vestiges of America’s dark past of African slavery and Jim Crow segregation in its aftermath. Many of the same conditions that inspired the Black Power Revolt exist today, racism, unemployment, segregation, discrimination and inequality.

The American Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Revolt

The American Civil Rights Movement was a mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of African slaves and their descendents to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery. Although American slaves were emancipated as a result of the Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s broke the pattern of public facilities being segregated by race in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal rights legislation for African Americans. Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant black activists had begun to see their struggles as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political and cultural consequences of past racial oppression. The Black Power Revolt has been seen as dawning in 1965, ushered in by the Watts rebellion, which started just five days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by...