Discrimination Against Jim Crow Laws

Words: 1852
Pages: 8

Throughout most of American history, blacks were not treated equally compared to the whites. During the beginning years of America, blacks were brought from Africa and were used as slaves. While most nations outlawed slavery, America still continued with using slaves because it was free labor. It was not until the end of the Civil War on 1865 did slaves become free by the thirteenth amendment; the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery in America. The 13th amendment, however, did not abolish discrimination. For the next one-hundred years, blacks were heavily discriminated against. Due to the Jim Crow laws, they were segregated almost everywhere in the southern states. They went to different schools, different restaurants, even different water …show more content…
was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta Georgia into a middle-class family. Both his father and his grand-father pastored the Ebenezer Baptist Church; they were also prominent in National Baptist Convention, their denomination’s largest organization. King attended college at Morehouse College, then Crozer Seminary, and then he went to Boston University. During his education, King studied, as stated in Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s by David Howard-Pitney, “theories for social change advanced by such thinkers as socialist Karl Marx and Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian independence leader and proponent of nonviolent civil disobedience as a tool for social political change” (Howard-Pitney 4). As a result, King believed in change without violence. Then in 1954, King became the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. During the Montgomery bus boycott, he became president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. King, along with other African American leaders, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The goal was use mass nonviolent actions and civil disobedience to mount and coordinate civil rights activities. Throughout civil rights movement, King traveled across the country, making speeches, raising money for the SCLC and other civil rights groups, and collecting supporters for African Americans’ civil rights. King “led many Americans to view the peaceful black Civil Rights movement as morally right…” (Howard-Pitney 6). Without King, many Americans would not care or would not know about the civil rights movement; King was able to successfully spread awareness about it and that is why the civil rights movement was a success. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 on a