A TRAGIC HISTORY
In Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress, was arrested for not standing and letting a white bus rider take her seat. When asked to move, Mrs. Parks refused. She did not argue and she did not move. The police were called and Mrs. Parks was arrested.
Riots broke out on the campus at the University of Mississippi, on September 30, 1962, requiring 12,000 federal marshals to restore order when James Meredith enrolled at the Oxford Campus under court order.
Governor George Wallace stood in the door of the University of Alabama, refusing the entrance of Black students on June 11, 1963.
Riots in the Watts district erupted in California, August 11 and 12, 1965. The National Guard was called in to put down worst single racial disturbance in the US. Thirty-five people died.
The National Guard was called in when Summer Riots, between July 18-23, 1966, broke out in Omaha, Nebraska, Chicago, Illinois, Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio.
Riots took the lives of forty-three, including 324 injured in the home of Motown music, Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three died and 725 were injured in the Newark, New Jersey riots. Dr. King, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young, Jr. came out in an appeal to stop the riots that took place from May 1 through October 1, 1967.
The riots scared the country like nothing before or since.
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964
Shortly after John Kennedy was elected in 1961, he began a quest for civil rights and racial equality. Following this assassination of yet another civil rights crusader, President Lyndon Johnson challenged Congress to pass the civil rights legislation that had been deadlocked at the time of Kennedy’s death. Dr. King publicly supported Johnson, saying that Johnson had taught him to recognize that there were “new white elements” in the South “whose love of their land was stronger than the grip of old habits and customs,” and expressed optimism that Johnson’s term would benefit African Americans. On July 2, 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a bill he hoped would “eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in America” Dr. King stood behind Johnson as he signed the bill into law.
CURRENT SITUATION
Today the US is still beset with many problems of social inequality. "We have among blacks, more unemployment, 2.5 million African-Americans in jail. We have an unfunded moral imperative to invest in healing the structural inequality," according to civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
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