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When did the American civil rights movement start?
Who were some key figures of the American civil rights movement?
What did the American civil rights movement accomplish?
What were some major events during the American civil rights movement?
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Abolitionism To Jim Crow
American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. African slaves and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of slaves until 1808 and providing for the return of slaves who had escaped to other states.
Image of the Declaration of Independence (1776) taken from an engraving made by printer William J. Stone in 1823.
Image of the Declaration of Independence (1776) taken from an engraving made by printer William J. Stone in 1823.
National Archives, Washington, D.C.
AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT EVENTS
As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of African Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called “free blacks” endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some slaves violently rebelled against their enslavement (see slave rebellions), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to achieve gradual improvements in their status.
During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free blacks. Slave owners in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of slaves to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of African Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.
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Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the ex-slaves who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography—one of many slave narratives—and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country’s founders had viewed blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not own slaves. The inability of the country’s political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party. Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.
Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its slave property. After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery (Thirteenth Amendment) and to protect the legal equality of ex-slaves (Fourteenth Amendment) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves (Fifteenth Amendment). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction, white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the “Jim Crow” system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, ignoring evidence that the facilities for blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.
The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote. With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights (see woman suffrage).
HEAR MY VOICE ESSIE BERRY CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST
American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. African slaves and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of slaves until 1808 and providing for the return of slaves who had escaped to other states.
BE THANKFUL FOR ALL GOD GIVE YOU
(psalm 23 - King James Version)
(1) The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
(2) He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
(3) He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
(4) Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
(5) Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
(6) Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Frederick Payne
12 hrs ·
I don't care what anybody talking about, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge is in CHRIST JESUS.
Beware of any man that says it's not so, just know their are many here to deceive us.
They are here to separte us from CHRIST, to get us to forget HIS sacrifice.
They tickle the ears of those who have false hope, they feen for vanities like they on some dope.
Their main focus is on some breakthrough, a breakthrough which has already come.
Our breakthrough was in CHRIST JESUS the only begotten SON.
HE freed us from damnation and gave us salvation, HE broke through the chains of bondage that had us bound.
Now every step we take in HIM our feet will be on solid ground.
A lot of folks say they believe and in HIM they trust, but when something don't go their way they holler, fuss and cuss.
They use the name of our LORD in vain as they run to and fro acting and sounding insane.
They say HE is not done with me yet or HE knows my heart.
But hold up there, HE is done with us for HE gave us life, HE gave us a way out of strife.
HE said HE will never leave nor forsake us.
On HIM we are to focus, and follow HIS commands, we are to rely on HIM and on HIS word stand.
HE done gave us all HE had, so it's up to us to co-operate and trust and give HIM our all, all of us.
We are to work on ourselves with HIS guidance and take what HE has given us and be in compliance.
I know this is new to some and it's hard to swallow, but if you study for yourself, with the help of the HOLY SPIRIT, it's not hard to follow.