ap us history essay

ap us history essay

The Impact of the Civil Rights Movement on American Society

1. Introduction

Despite the end of the Civil War and the apparent end of slavery, the African-American situation by the early 1900s had not improved to the extent that it should have. The time was the development of a minority leadership that had suffered a harsh initiation, struggle, domination, and perhaps sacrifice. The tension and terror of the blacks left in poverty and the whites in economic doubt formed an atmosphere of want, seizure, and powerlessness that kept the “negro problem” to the forefront, and in addition to the black vote and the legal and moral appeal to the political processes, created the drive that led eventually to the fulfillment.

The purpose of this research is to identify some of the many different ways that the Civil Rights Movement had an impact on the United States. To stress that the achievements of the freedom struggle witnessed the accomplishment of the aims of several previous generations, we use the word “fulfillment” in the title of this research. Section 2 provides an overview of the main civil rights organizations and leaders involved in the struggle. Section 3 quotes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and section 4 discusses its lasting impact, while sections 5-15 outline fifteen long-term social, economic, political, and institutional effects of the Civil Rights Movement. The conclusion presents a brief summary of the main findings.

2. Origins and Key Events of the Civil Rights Movement

Later Civil Rights Movement events and actions of significance include the Brown II Decision of 1955; the boycott of buses in 1955-1956 that made Rosa Parks an international figure; the actions taken by the “Little Rock Nine” of 1959; the Wave of Sit-Ins and Freedom Rides of 1961; the work done by many organizations and individuals in the fields of education and politics; the March on Washington; and three major murders carried out for racist reasons during the 1960s.

The origins of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States are generally traced to the need for a national movement for equal civil rights: the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, an effort to register African American voters and secure rights for African Americans in Mississippi; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Others assert that the Civil Rights Movement began at the beginning of the 20th century, and well before that in resistance to slavery. They stress the long civil rights struggle of slavery and subsequent de jure segregation in United States history, including the advances in civil rights brought about by the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Union Civil War activities; the roles of figures such as Frederick Douglass; and the actions of civil rights advocates and Supreme Court judicial decisions in the 1930s and 1940s who helped bring about change.

3. Legislative and Judicial Achievements

On the other hand, the courts, in a series of decisions in the 1950s, declared school segregation, whether by law or by custom, inherently unequal and unconstitutional. Throughout the North, legally segregated schools were ordered to desegregate. This did not happen immediately in some places, but over time it did. Little Rock happened, and so did the first major breakthrough of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Demonstrations and protests resulted in violent white reaction and arrests, legal victories in each case, and segregation fell. Meanwhile, other cases went to the Supreme Court, essentially forced into the educational desegregation that they desperately withheld. A 1954 decision finally ordered it, again though it was not practiced immediately. Brown II followed; court-ordered it be handled with desegregating “all deliberate speed.”

In addition to advances made by African Americans, American society became more inclusive in general. Fair employment practices were encouraged. Congress voted against continuing prewar segregation in the armed services and pushed especially for desegregation of federal agencies, which President Harry S. Truman strongly supported. Meanwhile, the federal government continued fees for separate facilities. Each was the responsibility of the private sector, not local, state, or even federal agencies. They were financed through minimum-wage legislation, FHA, and GI-filled housing for many veterans.

4. Social and Cultural Changes Resulting from the Movement

The movement also influenced the nation in several other ways. It provided many thousands of African Americans with a practical education in politics and the arts of political mobilization, and enhanced the capacity of many habitual non-voters in other groups to play a role in the political life of their cities and states. It developed more African Americans as public speakers and communicators, inspired many African Americans to aspire to office or leadership roles in business, and prompted some white Southerners to overcome their indifference, caution, or hostility, and try to help work out solutions to the pressing problems of southern society. The hopes of African American school children expanded as the strictures upon them fell by the wayside.

Although some white Northern college students helped form the backbone of SNCC in the South, the vast majority of demonstrators were Southern blacks. It was they who pressed intransigent whites, often at considerable risk. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., called upon to lead the bus boycott in Montgomery by African-American leaders long rooted in that community, became the movement’s best-known and most effective spokesman, but he knew that the movement’s long-term success depended on grassroots activity across the South. As he pointed out in the course of the boycott, every gain by an African American, whether large or small, moved the country toward the goals of the movement and made his own work easier. On the only ground that has any validity, then, the movement helped the whole country to succeed better politically as well as morally, by pressing it to act upon a Declaration which it had been content previously to treat as a lyrical ideal.

5. Legacy and Continuing Relevance

And then, as the dreams of racial democracy became more widely realized, they affected and increasingly unsettled deeply anti-black constituencies. However, the uplift benefits claimed and legitimatized by a black political establishment during the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act period needed to be scrutinized to clarify their actual nature.

The passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, as well as the provision of great new opportunities through affirmative action, in the 1960s facilitated the major expansion of black political activities and influence. This would occur at city, county, and especially state electoral levels. Such advances meant major improvements for black neighborhood living environments and even national law program efforts. It was these gains in the early 1970s that enabled various leading activists, strategists, and intellectual leaders to urge the movement to go into semi-retirement.

The Civil Rights and later movements also led to the realization of long-standing black desires for better access to traditionally white colleges and universities. Black women found expanded job opportunities in these institutions, which was also true for black studies and related disciplines like anthropology, history, and literature that sought to address pressing needs of the black community and further the movement.

The Civil Rights Movement, in the context of the larger social programs, was successful in leaving a major and continuing life-changing impact on American society. The desegregation of public schools in the South transformed the nation’s public education system. Over the next decades, this led to dramatic improvements in the achievement of black children, while also allowing their teachers to work in integrated professional environments.