Black Civil Rights and Feminist Rights
During the twentieth century, both the Civil Rights and the Women’s Rights movements had a comparable ambition in mind. They both wanted to gain the rights and opportunities that others had. In this research paper my goal is to compare and contrast both movements and how they went about chasing each of their goals, and at the same time express some of my viewpoints. The Black Civil Rights was a movement that began right when “Reconstruction” ended in the late 1870’s which granted all Americans to equal treatment under the law, as provided by the Fourteenth Amendment (Sidlow & Henschen, 99) I will be discussing certain examples that marked this movement significantly. For example, in the landmark of Plessey vs. Ferguson decision in 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the racist policy of segregation by legalizing “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites (Sidlow & Henschen, 101). The court then sentenced blacks to more than half a century of social inequality. Along with this certain act, came many more prominent movements that shaped the world today. The Selma to Montgomery March, for example, was a movement that both MLK Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership (SCLC) helped organized after the renowned Rosa Parks refused to move to the “colored section”. After being arrested and fined, many African Americans were spurred and began to organize a nine-year boycott (Sidlow & Henschen, 103). Through years of struggle the government proved unable to secure civil rights for Black people, and so activists started to take matters into their own hands in the early 1960s.
The Black Civil Rights Movement initially fueled the Liberal Feminism Movement or also known as the Women’s Liberation. This movement refers to a series of campaigns promoting gender equality and at the same time, opposing the perpetuation of gender discrimination in all economic, political, legal and social structures. In 1966 the National Organization for Women (NOW) was