Now I am just posting this here since in another thread a member of this forum was basically showing their idiocy at the civil rights movement that occured in the United States and all the countless lives that were lost by governmental (local) action and by terrorists, true terrorists.
Murders of African-Americans at the hands of whites were still common in the 1950s and still unpunished in large areas of the South. The murder of Emmett Till, a teenage boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955 was different, however: the age of the boy, the nature of his crime—allegedly whistling at a white woman in a store—and his mother's decision to have the casket open at his funeral, showing the beating that had been inflicted on her son by his two white abductors before he was shot and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River on August 28 all made what might otherwise have been a routine statistic into a cause célèbre. As many as 50,000 people may have viewed his body at the funeral home in Chicago and many thousands more were exposed to the evidence of his murder when a photograph of his corpse was published in Jet Magazine.
The two murderers were arrested the day after Till's disappearance. They were acquitted a month later after the jury of all white men deliberated for sixty-seven minutes. The murder and subsequent acquittal galvanized opinion in the North in the same way that the long campaign to free the "Scottsboro Boys" had in the 1930s.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks (the "mother of the Civil Rights Movement") refused to get up out of her seat on a public bus to make room for white passengers. Rosa was arrested, tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. After word of this incident reached the black community, 50 African-American leaders gathered and organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott to protest the segregation of blacks and whites on public buses. The boycott lasted for 381 days, until the local ordinance segregating African-Americans and whites on public buses was lifted.
Mississipi Freedom Program
COFO brought more than a hundred college students, many from outside the state, to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 ("Freedom Summer") to join with local activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom Schools" and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The work was as dangerous as ever: three civil rights workers, James Chaney, a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two white volunteers, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College anthropology student; and Michael Schwerner, a social worker from Manhattan's Lower East Side, were murdered by members of the Klan, some of them members of the Neshoba County sheriff's department, on June 21, 1964.
The national uproar caused by their disappearance forced the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate, even though President Johnson had to use indirect threats of political reprisals against J. Edgar Hoover to force him to do so. After paying at least one participant in the crime for details about the murders, the FBI found their bodies on August 4 in an earthen dam outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman had been shot once; Chaney, the lone African-American, had been savagely beaten and shot three times. The FBI also discovered in the course of its investigation the bodies of a number of other Mississippi blacks whose disappearances had been reported over the past several years without attracting any attention outside their local communities.
The disappearance of these three activists remained in the public eye for the month and-a-half until their bodies were found. Johnson used the outrage over their deaths and his formidable political skills to bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2, which bars discrimination in public accommodations, employment and education. It also had a section about voting, but voting was addressed more substantially by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1955-1968)
Now I don't know where you can find some braver people. White and Black and other people stood up in a non-violent protest that lasted many years and is still ongoing and has cost so many lives over the process. These are true heros.
Murders of African-Americans at the hands of whites were still common in the 1950s and still unpunished in large areas of the South. The murder of Emmett Till, a teenage boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955 was different, however: the age of the boy, the nature of his crime—allegedly whistling at a white woman in a store—and his mother's decision to have the casket open at his funeral, showing the beating that had been inflicted on her son by his two white abductors before he was shot and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River on August 28 all made what might otherwise have been a routine statistic into a cause célèbre. As many as 50,000 people may have viewed his body at the funeral home in Chicago and many thousands more were exposed to the evidence of his murder when a photograph of his corpse was published in Jet Magazine.
The two murderers were arrested the day after Till's disappearance. They were acquitted a month later after the jury of all white men deliberated for sixty-seven minutes. The murder and subsequent acquittal galvanized opinion in the North in the same way that the long campaign to free the "Scottsboro Boys" had in the 1930s.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks (the "mother of the Civil Rights Movement") refused to get up out of her seat on a public bus to make room for white passengers. Rosa was arrested, tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. After word of this incident reached the black community, 50 African-American leaders gathered and organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott to protest the segregation of blacks and whites on public buses. The boycott lasted for 381 days, until the local ordinance segregating African-Americans and whites on public buses was lifted.
Mississipi Freedom Program
COFO brought more than a hundred college students, many from outside the state, to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 ("Freedom Summer") to join with local activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom Schools" and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The work was as dangerous as ever: three civil rights workers, James Chaney, a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two white volunteers, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College anthropology student; and Michael Schwerner, a social worker from Manhattan's Lower East Side, were murdered by members of the Klan, some of them members of the Neshoba County sheriff's department, on June 21, 1964.
The national uproar caused by their disappearance forced the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate, even though President Johnson had to use indirect threats of political reprisals against J. Edgar Hoover to force him to do so. After paying at least one participant in the crime for details about the murders, the FBI found their bodies on August 4 in an earthen dam outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman had been shot once; Chaney, the lone African-American, had been savagely beaten and shot three times. The FBI also discovered in the course of its investigation the bodies of a number of other Mississippi blacks whose disappearances had been reported over the past several years without attracting any attention outside their local communities.
The disappearance of these three activists remained in the public eye for the month and-a-half until their bodies were found. Johnson used the outrage over their deaths and his formidable political skills to bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2, which bars discrimination in public accommodations, employment and education. It also had a section about voting, but voting was addressed more substantially by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1955-1968)
Now I don't know where you can find some braver people. White and Black and other people stood up in a non-violent protest that lasted many years and is still ongoing and has cost so many lives over the process. These are true heros.
