The Civil Rights Movement had began on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for denying to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. Rosa Parks arrest quickly publicize through the African American community. Parks had worked as a secretary for the local branch of the national association for the improvement of colored people, because she was a properly honor and proud individual in the community, her arrest was ultimately enough to convince African Americans that they could no longer tolerate racially biased laws. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was visiting his family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped, beaten to death, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for apparently whistling at a white woman. The two white men, were J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, they were arrested for the murder and absolve by an all white jury.
In the mid 1950s to the late 1960s the civil rights movement was a struggle to African Americans to accomplish civil rights equal to whites, involving equal chances in employment, housing, and education, as well as the right to vote, the right of equal access to public facilities, and the right to be free of racial discrimination. This was’t a group or government movement of the centuries has had as overwhelming an outcome on the legalized and political organization of the United States. This movement looked forward to reestablishing African Americans rights of natives promised by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which had been dissolved by segregationist Jim Crow laws in the South. It basically made changes in relations between the federal government and the States, as the federal government was required many times to enforce its laws and defend the rights of African American citizens. The civil rights movement also inspired the reemergence of the judicial authorities, embracing the Supreme Court, in its part as saving of individual liberties against most power. In advance, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, and other leaders of the movement anticipated, the movement let gains not only for African Americans but also for women, persons with disablement, and many others. On February 1, 1960, the “sit-ins”, who were Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair, Jr., walked into an F.W. Woolworth Company store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and purchased some school supplies, then went to the lunch counter and asked to be served. These four boys knew they probably would not be, the four freshmen at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College that were black, and this lunch counter was segregated, and they believed that since they had bought books and paper in the other part of the store, they should get served on the other part of the store. When these freshmen was force to leave the store when it was closing they was’t still served, and later the storeowners started putting “NO Trespassing”. The civil rights movement has been called the Second Reconstruction, in allusion to the Reconstruction inflict upon the South following the Civil War. During this period of times, the fourteenth amendment that was in 1868, permitting equal preservation of the laws, and the fifteenth amendment in 1870, had gave the rights to vote all males in any case of race were accepted, and armed forces from the North and the South from 1865 to 1877 to enforce the termination of slavery. Somehow, with the limit of Reconstruction in 1877, southern whites again took control of the South, passing a diversity of laws that discriminated on the support of race. These were called Jim Crow laws, or the black codes. They segregated whites and blacks in education, housing, and the use of public and private facilities such as restaurants, trains, and rest rooms; they also denied blacks the right to vote, to move freely, and to marry whites. Myriad other prejudicial and discriminatory practices were committed as well, from routine denial of the right to a fair trial to outright murder by lynching. These laws and practices were a reality of U.S. life well into the twentieth century.
Organized efforts by African Americans to gain their civil rights began well before the official civil rights movement got under way. By 1909, blacks and whites together had formed the NAACP known as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which became a leading organization in the cause of civil rights for African Americans. From its beginning, the NAACP and its attorneys challenged many discriminatory laws in court, but it was not until after world war ii that a widespread movement for civil rights gathered force.
The war itself contributed to the origins of the movement. When African Americans who had fought for their country returned home, they more openly resisted being treated as second-class citizens. The movement's first major legal victory came in 1954, when the NAACP won brown v. board of education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the Supreme Court struck down laws segregating white and black children into different public elementary schools. With Brown, it became apparent that African Americans had important allies in the highest federal court and its chief justice, Earl Warren. Martin Luther King Jr. had introduced his “I Have Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. to all people who march on Washington. Soon his speech encourages others on making African Americans equal to whites. Four young girls whose names were, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins attended Sunday school, and had gotten killed when a bombe had exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and was a popular location for civil rights meetings. In April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. at the age of 39, had got shot on the balcony outside the Lorraine Motel. After his killing everything started to change African Americans started getting more benefits just like the whites.