Civil Rights Movement in 1968

Civil Rights Movement in 1968

Civil rights had a long and difficult history in the United States beginning with more than three-hundred years of American Slavery. During that time, millions of native Africans were transported across thousands of miles of ocean in brutal conditions. Once in America, they were sold like cattle and forced to work throughout the Southern states, primarily in cotton and tobacco plantations. The Union victory in the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 ended American Slavery but did comparatively little to improve the lives of the freed African slaves (Edwards, Wallenberg, & Lineberry, 2008).

For most of the next century, African-Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities were subjected to rampant discrimination in employment, housing, transportation, and most other aspects of American society. Even well into the middle of the 20th century, it was not unusual at all to see signs posted in business establishment and newspaper employment advertisements that read "Help Wanted -- No Blacks or Jews Need Apply" (Edwards, Wallenberg, & Lineberry, 2008).

Furthermore, a series of Jim Crowe Laws were enacted to minimize any real effect of Supreme Court decisions and federal laws intended to end racial and ethnic discrimination (Edwards, Wallenberg, & Lineberry, 2008; Friedman, 2005). In Southern states in particular, local authorities provided little help because many of them were completely infiltrated by racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (Edwards, Wallenberg, & Lineberry, 2008).

The Political Situation in 1968

A Civil Rights Movement began to take shape in the early 1960s, marked by several memorable events such as the Civil Rights marches lead by Martin Luther King, his unjustified arrest in Birmingham, Alabama, the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white woman, the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers from New York in Mississippi, and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon B. Johnson (Edwards, Wallenberg, & Lineberry, 2008; Friedman, 2005). Likewise, American public schools had been officially desegregated by the 1957 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Ed. (EEOC, 2008), but progress implementing the requirements of that decision was painfully slow in many areas (Edwards, Wallenberg, & Lineberry, 2008).