The NAACP’s momentum to keep fighting came from the victories it has won. Many people are a part of African American history today were involved in many ways to help fight desegregate the South. Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer, was the critique of the “separate but equal” doctrine that justified segregation. Thurgood Marshall won a number of significant cases, Morgan v. Virginia (1946), Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) and Sweatt v. Painter (1950).
Furthermore, key individuals like Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks helped to draw attention to the cause and support the success of the Civil Rights campaign. The NAACP supported a series of Supreme Court cases which eventually resulted in the end of ‘de jure’ desegregation. The NAACP supported African-Americans who were being discriminated against; an example of a successful case for the NAACP is the Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The Civil Rights group sponsored Thurgood Marshall to act on behalf of Oliver Brown, which resulted in the breakdown of the Plessy v. Ferguson reasoning of ‘separate but equal’. Furthermore, the NAACP supported the case against Milam and Bryant in 1955 for the lynching of 14-year old Emmett Till, the NAACP helped by protecting his uncle Moses Wright.
She was an American Voting rights activist and civil rights leader. Fannie Lou Hamer is well known a fighter in the American Civil Rights Movement. Despite the prevailing literacy laws, she fought for the right to vote in 1962 as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Fannie believed that Black Americans needed to be educated on various aspects of economics and politics in order to be more successful. She not only championed for rights to vote but also fought against the pervasive poverty in the Black community.
Mary Church Terrell’s “What it Means to Be Colored in the United States” speech was delivered on October 10, 1906 at the United Women’s Club in Washington D.C. In this speech Terrell is speaking out about the injustices happening in America’s capitol against African Americans. She gives many personal experiences, and examples of how African Americans are still being treated like second class citizens in “The Colored Man’s Paradise” also known as Washington D.C. which speaks to how Terrell was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1863, and was the daughter of former slaves. Her parents sent her to a type of boarding school when she was young for elementary and secondary school. Mary then attended Oberlin College in Ohio, and was one of few African American women attending.
During the 1950’s and 1960’s, black Americans faced a number of civil rights problems. These problems included segregation, black voter – registration as well as poverty which began to become Martin Luther Kings focus after major civil rights legislation. Martin Luther King responded to these issues by organising a successful boycott to end segregation on transport, a march in Selma and his Poor People’s campaign. During the 1950’s and 1960’s one of the problems blacks faced was segregation. After the 1896 ‘Plessy vs. Ferguson’ ruling on ‘separate but equal’ everything was segregated.
Web. <http://http.thinkquest.org/12111/$G/$G5.html>. This article is a research paper by several scholars about the Scottsboro Trials, and is also the basis of the trial in the book “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The setting of the book “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is in 1930’s Alabama, which is where the Scottsboro trials took place. These trials were a turning point in the way African Americans would later be tried in a
With charismatic and intelligent spokesmen such as Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights campaigners had brought the plight of black Americans to the attention of the whole world. The federal government had been forced to respond and the legislation of the nation had been changed to address the inequality and oppression experienced by millions of black citizens. For many black Americans, and also many sympathetic white Americans, the hope was that the USA was entering a new age of equality and meaningful civil rights for all citizens. By the mid 1960s, however, many black Americans were becoming disillusioned. Many Southern states continued to harass and persecute blacks regardless of the new legislation.
Many court cases pushed to expose discrimination and racism, along with attempts to change unfair laws or prior court rulings. Two key Jewish supporters of the movement’s legal efforts were Shad and Justine Wise Polier. Shad Polier, a prominent American Jewish lawyer, fought in many civil rights cases, most notably the Scottsboro Trial, and worked alongside many members of the NAACP. Similarly, Polier’s wife, Justine Wise Polier (daughter of Reform rabbi Stephen S. Wise), was a major supporter of the civil rights movement, and “firmly believed in the Congress's principles—that ‘... law could and must be used to fight discrimination…’ " (Antler 281). Polier committed himself to working on the defense team for many civil rights cases, including Brown vs. Board of Education, which ended segregation in the public school system according to the Constitution (“Guide to the Shad Polier Papers”).
In conclusion, Parks and Colvin, both civil rights activists, fought for freedom and equal rights. Although both were arrested and convicted of the same crime, Parks became an icon of the civil rights movement against racial segregation thereby gaining a celebrity status. Colvin's celebrity status, on the other hand, was halted due to her moral transgressions. However, Colvin eventually played a vital role in the desegregation laws that preceded the Browder v. Gayle decision. Parks and Colvin, both equally responsible for the civil rights movement that
Her father was a social worker and executive secretary of the YMCA and her mother was a teacher. When she was young her parents would read to her the works of the great black writers. She grew up in Cleveland and attended Ohio State University where she experienced her first taste of racial strife, but still received a bachelor's degree in education in 1953. She began writing novels, short stories, and poems while still in college and a month after graduation she was married. The family moved to New York City so Kennedy could attend graduate school at Columbia University.