Analyze the causes and possible effects of the modern Civil Rights Movement using the terms of causuality: remote, contributory, intermediate, and main, as an organizing vehicle.
The Declaration of Independence defined the promise of America - freedom and equality for all Americans. Yet, prior to the execution of the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, African Americans were still enslaved. Even after the Civil War ended, they were still required to fight for educational, social, and political equality. The modern Civil Rights Movement was at a peak from 1955 to 1965. There were several events that directly or indirectly motivated the Movement: Rosa Parks' arrest, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the fight for integration in schools, and the murder of Emmett Till, all of which were overshadowed by the continued second-class treatment acquainted with African Americans after slavery was abolished.
Remote causes for the modern Civil Rights Movement can be traced back to the early 1600s when the American slave trade began, but it wasn't until the onset of the abolitionist movement that African Americans began to have a voice in American History.
President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Civil Right...
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy speaking to a c...
President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luth...The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution gave basic civil and political freedoms to African Americans, but it would be a long and difficult battle before those rights became a social custom in America. The end of the Civil War, which brought about these Amendments, was the legal end to slavery in the United States; however, iniquitous behavior toward African Americans was not uncommon throughout the Southern United States. Hostile whites, many whom were former slave owners, did not know how to treat blacks as equal human beings, and they surrounded, and still held authority over, freed African Americans in the South. Laws, called Black Codes, were imposed to severely restrict African Americans from advancing in society. In...