Q. What were the major thrust of the Civil Rights Movement?

Explain with reference to

the Role and contribution of Martin Luther King Jr.
Racism in America did not seem to go away and discriminatory acts like the Jim Crow Laws
and racial segregation further subjugated the Blacks. However, with the dawn of the 20 th
Century, a number of African Americans, having bared enough discrimination and violence,
began standing up and fighting for equality. A number of African-American leaders
emerged, providing a backbone for the movement. These agitations finally broke out into
the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and 60’s. Few of these influential leaders included
Marcus Garvey, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King Jr. They played important role in this
movement.
Civil rights were created in America through steady, nonstop efforts. Although the country
claims to be established by some similar rights of justice and equity, plenty of citizens
enjoyed privileges while others were deprived of essential freedom. Especially many “black”
slaves did not have any relation to the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
brought by the Europeans before the establishment of the country. On the contrary, both
the Constitution and national laws allowed and protected slavery in the country, though the
rights of freedom is written in Declaration of Independence. With the expansion of
American territory, only a small percentage of Black Americans were free from the being
slaves of the land owners. They primarily used nonviolent means to fight, but some violently
rebelled against society.

Frederick Douglass became one of the most famous figures in activist activity. His desirous
talks and diary produced persons’ awareness of the cruelty of the fight. When the court
refused African American political independence claims in 1857, it evolved into an extreme
disappointment for Black directors’ fights for equal rights, although their expanding
aggression in their contest against discrimination and various styles of prejudice based on
race. Dred Scott believes that the country’s establishing fathers trusted that Black human
beings had some rights that a white person was obligated to respect. Later with the
command of President Lincoln, the slave states wanted to separation of the country,
resulting in the beginning of Civil War in America. Lincoln originally had no goal of abolishing
slavery. Nevertheless, they did not deny the choice to discipline the disobedient states.
Because there was a great need for Black soldiers in the army, the Emancipation
Proclamation (1863) was issued, which liberated the enslaved people. Republican
commanders ensured the acceptance of constitutional corrections to conclude serfdom in
the 13th Amendment, and then it was guaranteed the voting rights and equality of people
who were no longer enslaved people in the 14th Amendment and later in the 15th
Amendment. Still, these constitutional rights protections were not enough, especially in the
northern part of the country, and it would take almost a century. Later to the 1960s of civil
rights movement marked significant progress, but the problem of racialism continued until
today.
Additionally, white regional officers surpassed other laws to boost racial segregation after
federal militia were withdrawn from the South. The Supreme Court overlooked proof that
the centers for African people were not as good as the ones designed for whites when it
decided in 1896 that “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans were responsible
for the 14th Amendment. The European and American colonial power over non-white
people in Africa, Asia, and many other parts of the world went with the “principle of white
supremacy”. Most non-white people in the world, like African people, were colonized or
economically exploited, and the law did not recognize their essential rights. However, it
should be noted that there was a long way to the civil status quo as we are used to
nowadays. Not only the colored race but also women of all races did not have voting rights
anywhere.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role
in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in
1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically
disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the
driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the
1963 March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legislation as
the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on
January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the second child of Martin Luther King Sr., a
pastor, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP,
refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was
arrested. Activists coordinated a bus boycott that would continue for 381 days,
placing a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business
owners. These activists, headed by E.D. Nixon, formed the Montgomery
Improvement Association (MIA). Martin Luther King Jr was unanimously elected as
the official spokesman of the MIA. King was heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi
and had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized,
nonviolent resistance.

Emboldened by the boycott’s success, in 1957 he and other civil rights activists —
most of them fellow ministers—founded the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), a group committed to achieving full equality for African
Americans through nonviolent protest. The SCLC motto was “Not one hair of one
head of one person should be harmed.” He would remain at the helm of this
influential organization until his death. In his role as SCLC president, Martin Luther
King, Jr. travelled across the country and around the world, giving lectures on
nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as meeting with re ligious figures, activists
and political leaders. Their philosophy of nonviolence was put to a particularly severe
test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963, in which activists used a boycott, sit -
ins and marches to protest segregation, unfair hiring pra ctices and other injustices in
one of America’s most racially divided cities. Due to his involvement in the Black civil
disobedience in Birmingham, Alabama, King was arrested on 12 th April 1963. During
his time in prison, king wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham jail” an eloquent
defence of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had
criticized his tactics.
Later that year, Martin Luther King, Jr. worked with a number of civil rights and
religious groups to organize the March on Washington, a peaceful political rally
designed to shed light on the injustices African Americans continued to face across
the country. Held on August 28 and attended by some 200,000 to 300,000
participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history o f
the American civil rights movement and a factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964. It was here that King made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, emphasizing his
belief that someday all men could be brothers. The rising tide of civil rights agitation
produced a strong effect on public opinion. Many people in cities not experiencing racial
tension began to question the nation's Jim Crow laws and the near century second class
treatment of African-American citizens. This resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 authorizing the federal government to enforce desegregation of public
accommodations and outlawing discrimination in publicly owned facilities. This also led to
Martin Luther King receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

The civil rights movement was among the most important social movements in 20th-century
United States history. The movement overturned de jure (legal) segregation in the South
and border states, ended southern disenfranchisement of most African Americans, and
increased economic and educational opportunities for many blacks, while helping to
facilitate the growth of the African American middle class. Apart from changing the lives of
many African Americans, the civil rights movement also influenced other movements for
minorities and women, the anti-Vietnam war movement in the United States, and the civil
rights movement in Northern Ireland, and was itself influenced by anticolonial struggles
abroad. The civil right movement’s successes included federal and Supreme Court rulings,
federal and state legislation, the growth of the African American electorate, many more
black elected officials, and increased educational attainment and income for many blacks.
Nevertheless, one-third of African Americans still lived in poverty in the 1980s. Covert and
overt racial discrimination also remained a reality for many. Early accounts of the civil rights
movement, which were heavily influenced by contemporary coverage by newspapers and
television, established what some scholars label the dominant narrative. These accounts
begin with the US Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education that declared
segregated public school segregation unconstitutional or with the Montgomery bus boycott
of 1955–1956; they end either with the Selma, Alabama, demonstrations of 1965 or the
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Early scholarship focused on mass protests,
prominent civil rights leaders, national or regional organizations, and the actions of the
federal government. Since the 1980s, however, many historians have extended the
chronology of the movement, both backward and forward in time, widened its geography
beyond the South, called attention to the contributions of women and lesser-known figures,
emphasized the importance of armed self-defense in the southern movement, and studied
the interplay of local, regional, and national civil rights struggles.

In the 1990s, historians began to realise that the Civil Rights Movement involved
different kinds of black activism – eg environmental and union campaigns – and the
role of black women, and of other disadvantaged groups such as Indigenous
Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans. Many historians now often refer
to the Civil Rights Movement as ‘the Black freedom struggle’, in order to more
accurately describe how ideas about black liberation have always involved more than
a focus on the legalities of civil rights, as important as they are. Some recent studies
have shown that black challenges to discrimination did not spring into existence with
Martin Luther King Jr in the 1950s. In what many historians now call ‘the long history
of the civil rights movement’, they acknowledge that these challenges began as early
as the 1860s. Gaines 2002, Hall 2005, and Theoharis 2006 argue that there was a
“long civil rights movement” that stretched from the New Deal era through to and
beyond the 1960s, and that this movement was national in scope. Other
contemporary scholarship has paid more attention to the freedom movement’s
international context, including the Cold War, decolonization, and campaigns against
racism in places like South Africa, Brazil, or Britain.

To Conclude - The civil rights movement in the middle of 20 th century helped African
Americans to win the Rights that had been taken from them for hundreds of years.
The movement fighting for black rights Appeared in the 1950s, which was considered
the most extensive progression of rights fighting in History. Thus, Martin Luther King
Jr.'s life had a seismic impact on race relations in the United States. Years after his death, he
is the most widely known African-American leader of his era. His life and work have been
honoured with a national holiday, schools and public buildings named after him, and a
memorial on Independence Mall in Washington, D.C. Though he was not without flaws and
limitations in his control over the mass movements with which he was associated, he was
nevertheless his activism and inspirational speeches, he played a pivotal role in ending the
legal segregation of African-American citizens in the United States and he was a visionary
leader who was deeply committed to achieving social justice through non-violent means.