Equality and Civil Rights

Equality and Civil Rights
Nasheena Wimbush
HIS 204
March 5, 2012
Instructor Georganna Gabrielli

Segregation is the action or state of setting someone or something apart from other people or things or being set apart.   African Americans had been set apart for years.   They have been discriminated against and isolated from others.   It was a hard battle that we are sometimes still fighting.
Discrimination is the unjust of prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex. Blacks were discriminated against a lot in the earlier years.   Blacks were not allowed to use the same toilets as whites.   Blacks even had separate water fountains that they used.   Blacks were made to ride in the back of buses and if the whites happen to overflow to the black part of the bus blacks were forced to give up their seats so that a white person could sit down.   Although blacks were Americans, they still did not have the same constitutional rights.   Blacks were not even allowed to vote.   African American children could not be in the same school as well as share a classroom with white children. Throughout the years many people and things transpired to change these things for blacks today.   Although sad but true there are still some acts of segregation and discrimination going on in today’s society.
Many civil rights activists fought for us to attain equality.   Martin Luther King Jr. chose to fight for equality using a non-violent technique. He held marches such as the March on Washington.   He also organized and led the Montgomery Bus Boycott.   A woman named Rosa Parks refused to get up from the white section of the bus and sit in the colored section.   This inspired Martin to lead the boycott.   Roughly 90 percent of all African Americans who rode buses on a daily basis began walking, riding bikes or carpooled to work. The boycott lasted until the Browder v. Gayle federal case on December 20, 1956, upheld by the Supreme...