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The struggle for equality for Americans of African descent continues despite the significant advances made during the 1950’s and 1960’s. The question arises as to whether the struggle for Civil Rights has actually benefited the descendants of the many who sacrificed jobs, properties, reputations, and even their lives. Has the American civil rights movement become irrelevant?

Since this nation’s birth, i.e., European discovery of the new world, Blacks, with exception to the native American Indians, have suffered disproportionately more than any other group. A cursory examination of world history will show that other groups have suffered more than the American Black. The brutal governments of Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Adolph Hitler are responsible for more deaths than any others in the history of the world. Nonetheless, limiting the discussion to American history, and the history of countries who have had the greatest influence on America’s development, the Black struggle for Civil Rights is unparalleled. No group in America has or has had more difficulty assimilating into the American culture. When one considers Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness for Blacks, we must first begin with the nation’s history and the enslavement of African Blacks.

Black Americans are often filled with rage when conjuring up visions of slavery in America. Most White Americans, however, are apathetic concerning slavery. They did not own slaves, so why should they feel any guilt over something that happened 100, 200, or 300 years ago? When one thinks of the Civil Rights movement, we initially think of non-violent demonstrations only forty years removed. From the boycott of the Montgomery bus system to the civil rights march on Washington, D. C., the visions are forever implanted in the minds of most Americans. The struggle for civil rights, however, did not begin with Rosa Parks nor the effort to desegregate the public school system in Topeka, Kansas. We would be remised if we ignore the earlier struggles that laid an immovable foundation for freedom and equality in America. The real struggle for civil rights actually began nearly four hundred years ago in the isles of the Caribbean’s where Blacks were bought and sold into slavery.

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the doctrine of separate but equal as applied to public education was unconstitutional. Brown marked the culmination of the NAACP’s long legal battle; the Court had effectively reversed its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the cornerstone of the segregation system. By implication, state-mandated racial segregation in all areas of public life violated the Constitution.

However, the Court issued a separate ruling one-year later concerning the enforcement of this momentous decision. Sympathetic to warnings of Southern white defiance, the Court allowed for a policy of gradual implementation that would, the opinion explained be responsive to local conditions and problems. While calling for compliance “with all deliberate speed,” the Court reflected the ambivalence of the justices, executive and congressional leadership, and the vast majority of Americans about dismantling racial segregation in the South. For most white Southerners, Brown II was a license to resist. Although nowhere in the opinion can the phrase “separate but equal” be found, the Court’s rulings approved legally enforced segregation as long as the law did not make facilities for blacks inferior to those of whites.

Equality of the two races before the law would have been perfect, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which has been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of

States where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced. During the next ten years, less than 1 percent of black children in the South attended “white” schools.

Brown was a major turning point in the struggle for civil rights, and it marked the beginning of the most celebrated chapter of the Civil Rights Movement. The decade that followed saw a heightening interplay between Southern blacks striving to realize the promise of Brown in the face of “massive resistance” by Southern whites and the equivocal response of the federal government, unfolding on an increasingly national and international stage.

The enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reinforced the guarantees of full citizenship provided for in the Reconstruction amendments nearly a century earlier, and marked the end of the Jim Crow system in the South. The desegregation of public facilities was swiftly implemented, and the rapid increase in black voting had far-reaching consequences for politics in the South and the nation as well. With the enforcement powers of the federal government greatly enhanced, the desegregation of public schools proceeded steadily, though “white flight” and the proliferation of private schools often made integration an elusive goal.

The fall of Jim Crow in the South removed the most extreme manifestation of racial discrimination and inequality, only to reveal deeply entrenched patterns of racial discrimination woven deep into the fabric of national life. For African Americans segregated in Northern cities and locked into poverty, the gains of the Southern movement had little direct relevance. Five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act; black frustration erupted into nearly a week of rioting in the Watts section of Los Angeles; urban disturbances and rebellions followed in other cities over the next three years. In 1968 the National Committee on Civil Disorders (also known as the Kerner Commission), appointed by the president, described “a nation moving towards two societies - one black, one white, separate and unequal.”

The Civil Rights Movement vastly expanded the parameters of American democracy and the guarantees of citizenship, while also raising new challenges in an ongoing struggle to advance racial and economic justice. Martin Luther King Jr. carried his efforts forward in very different settings: supporting challenges to residential discrimination in Chicago; protesting America’s involvement in Viet Nam; aiding striking garbage workers in Memphis; and developing plans for a Poor People’s March on Washington, which went forward after his assassination in 1968. At the same time, the call for “Black Power” eclipsed the integrationist thrust of the early 1960s, focusing renewed attention on black political and economic empowerment, while heightened black consciousness and racial pride found expression in the cultural renaissance of the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The civil rights movement forever altered the political landscape of the United States. Perhaps the greatest accomplishent of the movement can be seen in the thousands of African Americans who hold elective office. The number of black members of Congress was at a record high in the mid-1990s. African Americans have been elected to virtually every political office in all areas of the country. The Civil Rights Movement also ended the humiliating practice of segregation and abolished the laws which attempted to create two classes of citizens. Finally, the Civil Rights Movement created a sense of pride and self-esteem among those who participated in the movement. Blacks nowadays have got equal rights and laws. They are not seperated from white people anymore. The situation today is much better than it had been to that time. There are even relationships between black and white people, who love each other and do not think about culture, religion or skin, but

prejudices against black people and racism still exist and unfortunately will

exist in the future.