The Civil Rights MovementThe Civil Rights movement began on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks (1913– ), a black seamstress, refused to cooperate with a segregation law. As she boarded a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she took a seat in the designated "black" rows in the back. When the bus filled up she was asked to move so that a white man could have her spot. She refused to give the man her seat and was then arrested. This event sparked what would become a national movement of resistance to racial segregation (separation of black people from white people) and discrimination. Local black leaders organized around Parks with Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) as their leader. They decided to start a citywide boycott of the Montgomery bus system on December 5, 1955. The boycott lasted 382 days and ended only when the case had reached the Supreme Court, which ruled...
Civil rights movement, mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of African slaves and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery. Although American slaves were emancipated as a result of the Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities’ being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.
The main events that took place during the civil rights movement from 1954-1979 were the "sit-in movement", and the "Bus Boycotts".
President John F. Kennedy
As a result to the civil rights movement african-americans are now as equal as whites.
Montgomery Bus Boycott and Scottsboro trials
ere are many parallels between the trial of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird and one of the most notorious series of trials in the nation's history ?the Scottsboro Trials. On March 25, 1931, a freight train was stopped in Paint Rock, a tiny community in Northern Alabama, and nine young African American men who had been riding the rails were arrested. As two white women - one underage - descended from the freight cars, they accused the men of raping them on the train. Within a month the first man was found guilty and sentenced to death. There followed a series of sensational trials condemning the other men solely on the testimony of the older woman, a known prostitute, who was attempting to avoid prosecution under the Mann Act, prohibiting taking a minor across state lines for immoral purposes, like prostitution.
Although none of the accused were executed, a number remained on death row for many years. The case was not settled until 1976 with the pardon of the last of the Scottsboro defendants.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 is widely regarded as the event which began the modern civil rights movement. That may overstate the case, but the 381-day boycott was the first sustained mass protest against Jim Crow segregation, it did launch the civil rights careers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph David Abernathy, and Fred D. Gray, and it made a worldwide hero of a small, quiet woman named Rosa Parks.
African American citizens in many cities had for years complained bitterly about treatment on segregated city buses. Earlier in 1955, Sarah Mae Flemming had sued the city of Columbia, S.C., over its segregated bus seating, and in July 1955 the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case that segregated seating was unconstitutional. In July 1955, James M. Ritter had refused a driver's order to move to the rear of a Richmond, Va., bus and was fined $10. In Montgomery, bus-related disputes were common. On March 2, 1955, teenager Claudette Colvin was arrested for violating the same segregation law that Mrs. Parks ran afoul of on December 1, 1955. Colvin was the first person to plead not guilty to such a charge. Her attorney, Fred Gray, raised constitutional issues in her defense but she was convicted. The Women's Political Council (WPC), headed by JoAnn Robinson and Mary Fair Burks, had written letters to city officials protesting the lack of black bus drivers, rudeness on the part of white drivers, and the seating policies in general. But the arrest of Parks, the secretary of the local NAACP, galvanized local black leaders, including E. D. Nixon, who bailed her out of jail, and the members of the WPC, who on December 2 wrote and disseminated a flyer calling for a boycott for December 5, the day Parks was to be tried in municipal court.
As the news spread, other leaders joined in and a meeting was held to plan a one-day boycott. Ministers announced the boycott on Sunday, December 4, and on the morning of December 5, the boycott was almost completely observed by Montgomery's black citizens. When Mrs. Parks was convicted and fined $10, the leaders met that afternoon to form the Montgomery Improvement Association, elected King, then 26, as president, and held a meeting that evening at the Holt Street Baptist Church attended by more than 5,000 people who proclaimed their willingness to stay off the buses as long as necessary. The initial demands of the boycott leaders did not include changing the segregation law itself, but sought courtesy, hiring of at least some black drivers, and a first-come, first-seated policy with whites filling the buses from the front and blacks from the rear. Bus company officials, facing mounting losses, were eager to compromise, but intransigence on the part of city officials and rising violence against black citizens--included bombings, beatings, and petty harassment--led attorney Gray, then 25, to attack the segregation ordinance itself. This strategy ultimately succeeded. Meanwhile, the nation was focused on the philosophy and strategy of non-violence being articulated through King's powerful oratory, and the quiet perseverance of the black citizens of the city which a hundred years earlier had been the birthplace of the Confederacy. The significance of these 2 trials is that they treat the blacks unfairly.
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Trials of a true Southern Belle and Southern Gentleman
a) 1. Understand that while you may not originally come from the South, you can still acquire the mannerisms of a Southern gentleman. They are not inherited, they are learned.
2. First, you must know how to dress the part. A Southern gentleman takes time to dress up for a lady. He would never wear the same thing he wears while hunting with his buddies around a lady. Therefore, invest in some high quality clothing. A few good suits (Brooks Brothers and J. Press are very class) and some nice shoes, always polished, are a must for your wardrobe.
3. Learn how to speak while with a lady. A true Southern gentleman does not curse or tell off-colored jokes around a member of the opposite sex. He is all refinement and respect. The way he talks around his buddies does not carry over into how he talks to ladies. They understand that men and women are fundamentally different and they respect and cherish that difference
4. Southern gentleman are voracious flirts. They flirt with most women they meet--be it their wife/girlfriend, the lady serving them coffee, the little old lady who lives next door--everybody. But by flirtation I don't mean in a vulgar or sexual way. They simply know how to make women feel good about themselves. They are not shy. They will tell a woman how beautiful her eyes are or how pretty she looks in the dress she's wearing. They will look them up and down with an admiring glance. Oh, and another thing. Don't say "very" as in: "You look very beautiful today ma'am." Say "awfully" as in: "You look awfully beautiful today ma'am." No one says "very" south of the Mason-Dixon line.
5. Learn the basic gestures of old school chivalry--this isn't intended to be comprehensive but this will have the basics of chivalrous actions: Hold doors open for ladies (don't walk in front of them and hold the door open, let them go first), pull out her chair for her while dining, help a lady with her coat, offer your coat to her when it's cold outside, bring flowers whenever you are on a date (to the lady and her mother), bring a nice little gift whenever you are visiting a lady's house, walk on the outside of the street when walking with a lady, remove your hat when in the presence of a lady, give up your seat to a lady if on a train or subway, always stand when a lady enters the room, offer to light a lady's cigarette for her, open the car door for your date (and any other woman for that matter), and always insist on paying for a lady's meal.
6. Say "ma'am" and "sir" when talking to people who are older than you and/or in a position of authority. Remember, all ladies are "ma'am", it doesn't matter what age she is. Be effusive with gratitude too: You can never say "please" or "thank you" too many times.
7. Always defend a lady's honor. If a man is giving her a hard time at a bar or someone is telling a nasty joke to her, step in. Always offer to walk a lady home if she is alone late at night. Remember, a woman will always admire a man who can offer her his masculine protection.
8. Finally, a Southern gentleman is a man of his word. He is faithful to his wife, faithful to his church (is he is religiously inclined), unfailingly honest, and lives by a code of nobility. He is a genuine man in a world full of posers.
Harper Lee
a. Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Harper Lee grew up in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature (1926-38). As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
b. --- Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926 in Monroeville Alabama.
--- Lee was the youngest of four children born to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Finch Lee.
--- She attended Huntingdon College 1944-45, studied law at the University of Alabama 1945-49, and studied one year at Oxford University.
--- In the 1950s she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC in New York City.
--- In 1957 Lee submitted the manuscript of her novel to the J. B. Lippincott Company.
--- After being instructed to rewrite it, Lee worked on it for two and a half more years
--- In 1960 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Lee's only book, was published.
--- In 1961 she had two articles published: "Love --- In Other Words" in Vogue, and "Christmas To Me" in McCalls.
--- In June of 1966, Harper Lee was one of two persons named by President Johnson to the National Council of Arts.
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"To Kill a Mockingbird." (1960)
"Christmas to Me". (December 1961)
"When Children Discover America". (August 1965). "Cold Blood" (1966) Capote and lee collaborated "The Long Goodbye" (mid-1980s)
d. Pulitzer Prize (1961)
Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (1961)
Alabama Library Association Award (1961)
Bestsellers Paperback of the Year Award (1962)
Member, National Council on the Arts (1966)
Best Novel of the Century, Library Journal (1999)
Alabama Humanities Award (2002)
ATTY Award, Spector Gadon & Rosen Foundation (2005)
Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award (2005)
Honorary degree, University of Notre Dame (2006)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (2007)
Presidential Medal of Freedom (2007)
e. To Kill a Mockingbird was written and published amidst the most significant and conflict-ridden social change in the South since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Inevitably, despite its mid-1930s setting, the story told from the perspective of the 1950s voices the conflicts, tensions, and fears induced by this transition.
