What were the main causes of the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s?

Question

Also what effects are they having today

Answer 1

Hmmm ... I guess the question is, why did it happen in the '50s and '60s, but not at an earlier or later time? Why were the '50s and '60s the right time for the civil rights movement?

Of course, it didn't happen later, e.g., in the '70s and '80s because by that time, it had already occurred. So the question boils down to, why didn't it happen earlier?

(All the foregoing is mostly for me ... just to get me focused.)

As you know, when Reconstruction ended after the Civil War, white Southerners reasserted themselves by passing a lot of "Jim Crow" laws that enforced the racial divide. Also at that time, most Negroes (and that's the proper term) were still in the South.

From 1910 until 1930, there was a large migration of Negroes from the South to northern cities where there were manufacturing jobs. But the best jobs were held by whites, and a "de facto" segregation took hold in the North. (It was "de jure" in the South.)

Black culture thrived in the Roaring Twenties, but economic opportunities for African Americans were limited. This was the time when the Ku Klux Klan was at the height of its power.

The 1930s featured the Great Depression when all Americans suffered, and that's no time for a civil rights movement to take hold. The problem was that blacks would be competing with whites for jobs, and during the Depression, whites wouldn't stand for that.

World War II changed all that. Negroes served in the military, to a limited degree -- still in segregated units -- but returning veterans saw that life on the home front for blacks still was not good. Feelings for racial equality grew stronger.

After the war, the domestic economy boomed due to pent-up demand for consumer goods, and people across the board sensed that better times were ahead. This was the beginning of the baby boom. President Harry Truman ordered the military to integrate, and retrospectively, this was probably a milestone event.

In this more positive environment, the time was more favorable for an assault on the bastions of racism in this country. Lawyers, especially the NAACP Legal Defense Fund headed by Thurgood Marshall, were in the forefront, aided by a liberal Supreme Court packed with FDR nominees and headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren (former California governor nominated to the Court by Eisenhower).

The 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case was the big breakthrough. It overturned the 1920 Plessy vs. Fergusen ruling which established the "separate but equal" doctrine, saying that the Topeka, Kansas schools had to be desegregated "with all deliberate speed," and that segregated schools were "inherently unequal."

Following the Brown decision, there were many other civil rights victories in the courts, but in 1955, the budding movement took to the streets of Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in a city bus, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by a young preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., captured the nation's attention.

Sometime later, there was an epic Selma to Montgomery march featuring a showdown at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where fire hoses were used by local authorities against the marchers. These scenes, shown on national television, served notice on white middle America that Negroes were entitled to civil rights. Television, then in its infancy, was therefore a vital piece of the timing because the entire nation, for the first time, could see the effects of institutionalized racism.

For the Civil Rights Movement to succeed, the majority of White America needed to be won over.

In the late '50s and early '60s there were many other notable incidents. The Emmett Till murder had occurred earlier; four young black girls were killed in a church bombing; President Eisenhower had to call out the National Guard to escort nine black students to Little Rock Central High School in 1958; and the list goes on.

Despite his reputation, President Kennedy was not a strong civil rights supporter, but his brother Bobby was. And after JFK was killed, President Lyndon Johnson, a Texan and a very powerful politician, forced several major civil rights bills through Congress.

That's the history. As to why it happened when it did, I'd say (1) sufficient time (70 years) had to pass after the Civil War and Reconstruction; (2) the economy had to be looking up (mass movements don't work in bad economic times); (3) there had to be effective, forceful leadership; and (4) the white majority in this country had to be convinced that the cause was just.

I won't say much about the effects today, except to say that the effects are everywhere. People who never lived in segregated society don't know what it's like to live in such an environment. And that applies to most of the people alive in this country today. 'Nuff said.

Answer 2

RE:
What were the main causes of the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s?
Also what effects are they having today

Answer 3

Causes: unequal treatment, racism.
They're still working on those.