Essay On The Civil Rights Movement

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The Civil Rights Movement has made a lot of progress from the time of the Civil War to the present. Prior to 1865, slavery was legal in many states. One court case that reflected the views of this time was Dred Scott v Sandford in 1857. During this court case, the Supreme Court ruled that blacks were considered property and could never obtain citizenship. It was clear that this was about to change, however. You could argue that the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement occurred with the passing of the Civil War Amendments, which were three amendments that were adopted during or just after the Civil War. The first Civil War Amendment was the 13th Amendment and it was passed in 1865. This Amendment ended slavery for good. The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868 and gave blacks citizenship. The 15th Amendment stated that blacks can vote in 1870. After the Civil War was resolved, all states were forced to abide by these amendments, whether they liked it or not. Many pro-slavery states passed Jim Crow Laws as a way to create a legal loophole to keep black people in their place. They were a series a legislative acts and social attitudes that called for …show more content…

One aspect of this was a Literacy Test. A test was administered before you could vote to determine if you could read well enough before you voted. This was discriminatory because blacks typically couldn’t read or write as well as whites could. There was also a Poll Tax, which discouraged the poor from voting. The Grandfather Clause stated that if your grandfather had voted, then you could vote as well, but at the time, every black person’s grandfather wasn’t even considered a citizen. White Primaries rendered the black presidential votes useless. Racial Gerrymandering used district lines that were drawn in such a way that one demographic group had an advantage over the other. These were all designed to keep blacks from

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