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Civil Rights Movement
Although African Americans
had made several attempts after the Emancipation Act to
improve their status, they had no real victory until 1954,
when the Supreme Court listened to the case of a young girl
who had to travel 25 miles to an African-American school,
even though a whites-only school sat two miles from where
she lived. The Court overturned the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson
ruling that instituted the "separate but equal" standard.
The next year an African American
seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give her seat on
a bus to a white man and was arrested. Several ministers--including
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., met the next day and arranged
a boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama bus system, costing
the bus company 65% of its income. After Dr. King spent
time in jail and a huge fine, the Supreme Court ruled that
bus segregation violated the Constitution.
Little Rock, Arkansas was the
next town to experience the impetus of the Civil Rights
Movement. In 1957, Little Rock Central High School was desegregated.
At the order of Arkansas governor Faubus, National Guardsmen
prevented the small group of African American students from
entering the school. After a court injunction allowed the
students to enter the building and prevented the governor
from taking action against it, 1,000 townspeople rushed
to the school to remove the students. On September 25, President
Eisenhower ordered 1,000 paratroopers and 10,000 National
Guardsmen to assure that the students be allowed to remain
in school.
The Civil Rights Movement began
to spread across the nation--and across racial lines--in
1960, when an African American college student returned
to a Woolworth's lunch counter with three friends for several
days after he was refused service the first day. When the
New York Times publicized the protest, students in every
state, both black and white, joined in similar protests.
The next two years brought
more violent episodes to the Civil Rights story. Nonviolent
protests in 1961 against segregation at bus terminals often
met with police armed with rifles. The first African American
student at the University of Mississippi, escorted by Federal
Marshals, encountered a violent mob. Before the National
Guard could arrive to stop the rioting, two students were
killed.
In 1963 two famous marches
pinnacled the Civil Rights Movement--the protest march in
Birmingham, attended by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverend
Ralph Abernethy and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, and the
March on Washington, organized by two Civil Rights activists
and attended by two hundred thousand people. Bayard Rustin
and A. Philip Randolpf were both active in organizing events
to improve both race relations and the quality of life for
African Americans. Furthermore, Dr. King's "I Have a Dream"
speech was immortalized on this day.
President Lyndon Johnson passed
the Voting Rights Act in 1965, giving African Americans
the right to vote, but after a great cost. Earlier that
same year, Dr. King planned to lead a march on Sunday, March
7, from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the killing
of a demonstrator in Marion, Alabama. When Governor George
C. Wallace disallowed the march, Dr. King spoke to President
Johnson and delayed the march until the next day. However,
when protesters began the march on Sunday anyway, they were
met by a line of state troopers, who warned them to turn
around and then immediately attacked them. When the troopers
followed the marchers to a black housing project, they beat
residents of the project who had not attended the march.
Because of "Bloody Sunday" as the event was nationally branded,
President Johnson addressed Congress about the importance
of civil rights. On March 25, Dr. King successfully led
the march from Selma to Montgomery.
The Grahams' Involvement
In 1953-a year before schools were legally desegregated-Billy
Graham quietly took a stand on racial division by tearing
down the ropes that separated the Whites from the African-Americans.
Early in the 1960s he conversed with Dr. King about standing
against racial division. "He urged me to keep on doing
what I was doing," Billy writes in his autobiography,
"preaching the Gospel to integrated audiences and supporting
his goals by example-and not to join him in the streets."
Holocaust
| Korean War | JFK's
Assassination | Vietnam War
| Civil Rights Movement
Watergate | Televangelist
Scandals | Oklahoma City Bombing
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