Dead and Gone?

The Civil Rights movement has inculcated many lessons to the new generation. Lessons such as overcoming injustice by protesting peacefully, realizing institutional racism can never be demolished, and never giving up the righteous fight for freedom. These lessons were hard fought and required time and patience. I believe these values scratched the surface of a perfect society and are still in play today. We can still see institutional racism, peaceful protest, and people fighting for their freedom.

The fight for freedom was an essential and crucial part of the United States and their struggle for freedom from Great Britain. It was one of America's founding ideologies and after all those years of painstaking struggle, they refused freedom to their economic suppliers. I believe if you fight for something and you don't promise to give it back to people, you are a hypocrite. This is exactly what the United States government has done from the beginning. Overtime, people began to challenge the old ways and ask for what they were guaranteed due to their natural birth rights. In the Civil Rights Movement, people fought for freedom by protesting peacefully. Some methods of peaceful protest included sit-ins, the famous march on D.C, and peacefully being arrested to fill up jails to draw national attention to the issue. In Birmingham Alabama, thousands of kids gave up their arrests so they could fill up jails and as a result, notify the country of the horrors occurring in Alabama.

Institutional racism is a plague that cannot be cured and therefore resides in the heart of the government. It still exists today in schools, employment, and federal prison system as it did three centuries ago. During the Civil Rights movement, colored people were not employed equally and were handed terrible jobs. They were also provided with extremely poor housing which led up to the fair housing act that diminished the unequal housing that colored people received. Schools were the most common place where institutional racism existed. For centuries African-Americans were schooled in poor conditions. This all changed when the govt. made the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. In today's society, if we look at many schools we can notice that African-Americans and Latinos are struggling with grades and are more likely to end up in detention or resource centers than other races. The federal prison system also consists mostly of blacks and Hispanics. In contrast, the staff of these federal prisons is mostly white. This clearly that implies the minorities in the United States are usually the ones suffering.

The most important lesson that is taken from the Civil Rights Movement is to never give up your fight for freedom. The fight has been carried out by many great activist, such as, W.E.B DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Charles Hamilton Houston, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. These leaders have carried the torch to freedom and it was finally lit during the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They have sacrificed personal riches to pursue a fight that seemed undo-able but not impossible.