Events of The Civil Rights Movement

　
　
There was an astonishing number of events and movements of the pre-World War II decades that led to the Civil Rights Movement. A prime example would be the amount of lynchings that occurred during this time. In The Negro Holocaust, Robert Gibson states, “the lynching of black people in the southern sates became an institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize blacks and maintain white supremacy. The brutal acts of violence of lynchings helped to awaken several civil rights causes, including the NAACP. Much of their work was credited for the end of lynchings.
Another example of an event that led to the Civil Rights Movement would be the widespread race riots that seized the nation. Large scale interracial violence became an epidemic, as increased numbers of blacks migrated towards northern cities. The widespread violence created a black response that would change the nation. The African American community responded to white mob violence with organized non-violent protest. The protests created new civil rights groups, and furthermore, created a morally justifiable response to violence and oppression.
World War II also influenced and furthered the struggle for African American freedom even after its end. During the war, millions of men and women from different racial and ethnic minorities challenged America’s contradiction of the color lines. They labored earnestly during the war, and expected their labors to be recognized and rewarded by America. Instead, they found on their return, that America was still a place of segregation, and prejudice. It was this finding, that impelled African Americans to action against discrimination.
In addition, after World War II occurred, Americans were forced to look critically at the color lines of their own society, when compared with Hitler’s Nazism, and its ideology of Aryan racial supremacy. Gunnar Mydral’s An American Dilemma states, “Americans must apply the principle of democracy more explicitly towards race. Fascism and Nazism are based on a racial superiority dogma-not unlike the old hackneyed American caste theory-and they came to power by means of persecution and oppression. Therefore, Americans must stand before the whole world in support of racial tolerance and equality”. The famous case of Brown v. The Board of Education, ruled that separate educational facilities were inherently equal. While integration remained largely a court ruling on paper, segregation persisted as a reality in society. African Americans realized that change should be shifted towards the courts of their own communities. Just a short year after the Brown case, one of the most momentous stirrings for racial justice began on December 1, 1955, when a women by the name of Rosa Parks began her activism in civil rights protests. Her ultimate arrest was the cause of an explosive protest- The Montgomery bus boycott. A new generation was faced with its own struggle for liberation. It was what gave rise for the need of African Americans to stand and to take the responsibility of liberation into their own hands.