SC - Civil Rights Movement Lesson

Civil Rights Movement

TV newscasts also changed the shape of American culture. Americans who might never have attended a civil rights demonstration saw and heard them on their TVs in the 1960s. In 1963, TV reporters showed helmeted police officers from Birmingham, Alabama, spraying African American children who had been walking in a protest march with high-pressure fire hoses, setting police dogs to attack them, and then clubbing them. TV news coverage of the civil rights movement helped many Americans turn their sympathies toward ending racial segregation and persuaded Kennedy that new laws were the only way to end the racial violence and give African Americans the civil rights they were demanding.

You are required to review this 1960s Society and Culture Chart Links to an external site. and view the presentation below on Civil Rights leaders and their struggle for change.

Two civil rights groups prominent in the struggle for African American rights in the Sixties were The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Review the following breakdown to see how SCLC and SNCC started as similar organizations but grew to differ over time, especially in SNCC's changing composition.

	SCLC	SNCC
Founding	Founded by Martin Luther King, Jr., and other ministers and Civil Rights leaders	Founded by African American college students with $800 received from the SCLC
Goal	To carry on nonviolent crusades against the evils of second-class citizenship	To speed up changes mandated by Brown v. Board of Education
Original Tactics	Marches, protests, and demonstrations throughout the South, using churches as bases	Sit-ins at segregated lunch counters all across the South; registering African Americans to vote, in hope they could influence Congress to pass voting rights act
Later Tactics	Registering African Americans to vote, in hope they could influence Congress to pass voting rights act	Freedom Rides on interstate buses to determine if southern states would enforce laws against segregation in public transportation
Original Membership	Average African American adults; white adults	African American and white college students; included whites at first, but later it became all-African American organization
Later Membership	Same as original membership	African Americans only; no whites
Original Philosophy	Nonviolence	Nonviolence
Later Philosophy	Same as original philosophy	Militancy and violence; " Black Power " and African-American pride

 

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