What Is The Course Of The John Lewis Civil Rights Movement

As a boy, John Lewis heard about the Montgomery Bus Boycott only a few miles away… the beginning of a Movement that he would become a leader within. In the 1960s, an eager college student who lived in an area that was very hostile to his race, John Lewis, became one of the most prominent Civil Rights leaders. While Lewis was growing up and becoming an adult in the harshness of the southern states of the United States of America, he realized the laws against his skin color, Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were laws against African Americans that prevented them from having rights that any human should have. He worked with his fellow college classmates as they had both shared the same type of work ethics and drives. The group worked well together …show more content…
The students of the Sit-Ins thought that most of the civil rights organizations were not active enough or handling the situations correctly(Carson, “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee”). On Easter weekend of 1960, Ella Baker held a conference to create a student-run group, which became known as SNCC, at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina(a location very close to where the Sit-Ins had been happening). SNCC was a group of ready and willing students that worked together to plan peaceful protests and events to combat segregation and discrimination in the South. The group included students of James Lawson’s workshops, students that participated in the Sit-Ins and other ambitious students. The aspect that made SNCC so accomplished was the fact that the leaders of the organization were extremely eager students that wanted progress and results immediately. Lewis became the chairman of SNCC from 1963 until 1966. Lewis led SNCC to some of the largest civil rights …show more content…
Lewis was motivated after such a great achievement that he became a Freedom Rider. The Congress of Racial Equality(CORE) decided to peacefully protest to force the federal government to enforce two Supreme Court decisions that had ruled segregation in interstate buses and facilities was unconstitutional(Morgan v Virginia(1946) and Boynton v Virginia(1960)). Black and white riders were to travel from Washington D.C to New Orleans, testing the segregation laws when they would refuse to get up when they crossed into segregated states, but later on, when violence broke out in Alabama, CORE had to cancel the Freedom Rides. The first incident was in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Lewis and his colleague, Albert Bigelow were attacked and knocked unconscious for trying to use an all-white bathroom. Then on May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus encountered a group of 100 people in Anniston, Alabama. The mob attacked them and one of the buses was firebombed. Then in Birmingham, the bus was attacked by twenty men who beat the passengers. The police force was supposed to help the riders but gave no protection at all and was sometimes even with the KKK(some of the police were even KKK members themselves). This was just the first Freedom Ride but the brutality was already so extreme. In the end, the Freedom Rides did result in the Interstate Commerce Commission ban on segregation. The rides did continue, however,