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The Civil Rights Movement Of African Americans

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Civil rights are the rights that every person should have no matter their sex, religion, or race. These were deprived to African Americans for hundreds of years, long before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. African Americans were slaves from the 1500s until the 1860s when the Civil War happened. After the slaves were freed, there was still a lot of segregation and racism throughout the U.S., especially in the South. The government put into place Jim Crow Laws, which were strict segregation laws that would punish people who associated with people of another race, if the law forbade them to do so. They also used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other things of the like to prevent African Americans from voting. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, or rather known as the KKK, would perform violent acts to minorities. They would bomb, carry out beatings and shootings and set fires to blacks’ homes. Some African Americans were fed up with this bad treatment and started protests in the 1950s. In 1954, there was a Supreme Court case- Brown v. Board of Education where there was a unanimous vote that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and it overturned Plessy v. Ferguson where the court said people of different race were “separate but equal.” Thurgood Marshall was the attorney in that case and later on he became the first African American Supreme Court judge. In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American woman, born on February 14, 1913 in

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