Ch 28 blog

After many years of fighting, African Americans continue to fight for the right to be equal.  Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister whose leadership galvanized the modern, grass-roots civil rights movement in the 1960s.  He launched nonviolent marches, sit-ins and prayings in Birmingham, Alabama.  Birmingham was the most segregated big city in America.   On June 11 president Kennedy went on television to define civil rights as “ a moral issue” and to assert that “race has no place in American life or law.”  Kennedy proposed a bill that would outlaw segregation in public facilities and authorize the federal government to withhold funds from programs that discriminated.  Martin Luther King Jr led a march to Washington in 1963 where he gave his famous speech “I Have A Dream.”  He had turned a political rally into a historic event.  This movement just aggravated the white people’s anger even more and some lives of African Americans were lost. 

Kennedy’s assassination broke the hearts of many Americans.  Lyndon Johnson took the role as president and created the Civil Rights Act.   The most significant civil-rights law in the U.S history banned racial discrimination and segregation in public accommodations.  It outlawed bias in federally funded programs, granted the federal government new powers to fight school segregation, and created the Equal Employment Opportunity to enforce a ban on job discrimination on the basis of race religion, national origin, or gender.  One thing that the Civil Rights of 1964 did not address was the right to vote.  In 1965 the president signed the Voting Rights Act that allowed the federal government to protect the rights of blacks to vote; transformed southern politics. Black power rose in 1966 which expressed eagerness of militant activists for militant self-defense and rapid social change.  Malcolm X was a radical leader that proclaimed Black Power and challenged the nonviolent wing of the movement. As a result many African Americans were able to gain education and professions but others were still stuck in poverty.