The Civil Rights Movement

Mississippi Burning

The Doll Test

• Movie released in 1988
• Sadly, the movie is based on true events that occurred in 1967 where only seven of the eighteen men accused of killing the boys were convicted and received between 3-10 years in jail, however, none of them served more than 6 years

A Streetcar Named Desire

An American Dilemma

• 1945 play
• contrasting black and white
• Blanche = white
• Stanley represents an immigrant
• “‘You healthy Polack, without a nerve in your body, of course you don’t know what anxiety feels like!’ ‘I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don't ever call me Polack” (Williams 134).

• One of the crucial points that was extremely influential in the outcome of Brown v. Board of Education was The Doll Test
• In the 1940s, a few psychologists got together and created a test to see just how detrimental segregation was to society and, in particular, to the self-esteem of African American children.

• published in1944 by Gunnar Myrdal
• “There is a ‘Negro Problem’ in the United States and most Americans are aware of it, although it assumes varying forms and intensity in different regions of the country…The Negro problem is an integral part of, or a special case of, the whole complex of problems in the larger American civilization” (Myrdal xlv-liii).

The Pay Gap

Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and Stephon Clark

• In 2016 the Economic Policy Institute conducted a about the pay gap study
• “the median black worker earned 75 percent of what the median white worker earned in an hour”
• “the difference in median household income is tens of thousands of dollars ($39,490 for black households, $65,041 for white households
• The difference in median family net worth is hundreds of thousands of dollars ($17,600 for black families, $171,000 for white families)”
• perpetuating segregation in our society

Works Cited

Brown v. Board of Education

“American Dilemma: the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy : Myrdal, Gunnar : Free Download & Streaming.” Internet Archive, archive.org/details/ AmericanDilemmaTheNegroProblemAndModernDemocracy.

Ashland University. “Civil Rights Era.” Teaching American History, teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/i-have-a-dream-speech/

“Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958).” Justia Law, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/358/1/ case.html.

Haberman, Frederick W. “Martin Luther King Jr.” Nobelprize.org, Elsevier Publishing Company, 1972, www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-bio.html.History.com

History.com Staff. “Rosa Parks.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 2009, www.history.com/topics/black-history/rosa-parks.

• In Mississippi 1955 Emmett Till was brutally murdered
• In 2012, Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a white man
• In 2018 Stephon Clark was shot 8 times in the back. Investigations after, revealed that there had been an unnecessary number of shots fired

Thesis

• Oliver Brown filled against the state of Kansas in 1954
• The case was directly challenging the Jim Crow Laws that ruled the South
• The Supreme Court ruled this segregation illegal, but we still see this type of segregation existing

Conclusion

Books like A Streetcar Named Desire, To Kill A Mockingbird, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings all demonstrate to the reader the issues that plague the nation. At one point or another, all of these books were banned in the United States which goes to show just how influential they can be. The topics that they cover are still subjects that people don’t want to discuss because they would rather not acknowledge that racism and segregation still exist in our world today. While it may seem like after the Civil Rights Movement ended circa 1969, that African Americans were free from unequal treatment, we can see that this just isn't true. Issues like the pay gap, derogatory language, and unjust killings really demonstrate that we need to invoke change. If we ever want to be able to move on from this dilemma that Gunnar Myrdal pointed out, then we need to be willing to accept that there is an issue, and actually do something about it.

Despite the numerous advancements made during the civil rights movement in America during the mid-twentieth century—the removal of the Jim Crow laws, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—we as a society still are dealing with racist and bigoted attitudes exhibited in the literature of this time.

Little Rock Nine

• Nine African American students were going to attend school at a previously white high school
• On their first day, the Governor of Arkansas sent the National Guard to try and stop them from entering the building

To Kill A Mockingbird

• Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in the 1960s in the deep South of Alabama
• Tom Robinson v. Mayella Ewell
• “‘[Scout] Atticus, are we going to win it?’ [Atticus]‘No, honey.’ ‘Then why –‘ ‘Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,’ Atticus said” (Lee 87)

The Civil Rights Movement

of the 1940-1960s

By Eisa Lee