American Blacks experienced a
revolution after 1945, a revolution in expectations. Following World War Ⅱ, the
steady movement toward first-class citizenship for Black people quickened, with
significant actions taking place in courts of law, in voting booths, in
restaurants and in the streets of the nation. A decade of
intense civil rights activity was launched in 1954 when the United States
Supreme Court declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional. In 1955, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. , effectively organized the Blacks of Atlanta, Georgia,
in a bus boycott. The boycott lasted two years, and when it was over, Blacks no
longer were degraded by being forced to sit or stand in the rear of
buses. In 1960, a group of Black college students decided that
they, sis well as white persons, had the right to eat at a lunch counter in
Greensboro, North Carolina. This sit-in sparked an aggressive national movement
and, in the next few years, thousands of young men and women -- Black and white,
North and South -- overturned local laws and customs that had maintained
segregation. Sit-ins, prayins, freedom rides, freedom marches and demonstrations
to open all schools to Black children took place across the
nation. |