Payne Essay “Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-68” (Steven Lawson and Charles Payne) is a book that is about how Charles Payne and Steven Lawson look at the people who made the movement a success and how they did it. We are specifically looking at Payne’s point of view, “The View from the Trenches”. Charles Payne was born in March 1948. He studies civil rights activism, urban education reform and lots of other things. He has several organizations that try and address social justice. Instead of this book being about one person who made it happen it’s about lots of people who helped make the movement happen. He tells all their different stories. It ranges from men, women, ministers and regular day people. We have people like Charles Hamilton
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“Black activists were more aggressive, to which the white South responded with a wave of repression” (Payne 117). The whites in the south wanted to get rid of black people so when they started fighting back the whites were angry. Septima Clark was like Delaine she lost her job because she was an activist. She fought for Black teachers to be hired and later on was deeply involved in the NAACP. Even though Payne talks about less known people he does talk about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. We often hear that Parks was caught up in these events on accident, but “she had spent her adult life looking for a way to make a difference” (Payne 127). She joined the NAACP, who then became the secretary. She wasn’t simply there by accident she was known by many bus drivers to not follow the segregation laws. Most of the time bus drivers wouldn’t even stop to pick her up. These events are what have gotten us to the way we are today whites are more accepting of Black people and we have a lot of interracial relationships that we didn’t used to have. It’s not frowned upon anymore. We don’t have laws to segregate or discriminate black people. If all these people didn’t do what they did (Delaine, Houston etc.) We probably wouldn’t have had all these changes in …show more content…
Houston, Delaine, Clark did everything that Rosa Parks did but you have never heard of these names. Why didn’t they get more recognition? This is what Payne wants us to see. He wants us to realize that these people worked just as hard as everyone else but didn’t get the credit. They were just as much help in the movement as Martin Luther King Jr. was and more. Rosa parks was doing this to make a difference and so was everyone else that went along this journey with her. ”Placing so much emphasis on national leadership and national institutions minimized the importance of local struggle and makes it difficult to appreciate the role “ordinary” people played in changing the country and the enormous personal costs that sometimes entailed for them” (Payne
“Black activists were more aggressive, to which the white South responded with a wave of repression” (Payne 117). The whites in the south wanted to get rid of black people so when they started fighting back the whites were angry. Septima Clark was like Delaine she lost her job because she was an activist. She fought for Black teachers to be hired and later on was deeply involved in the NAACP. Even though Payne talks about less known people he does talk about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. We often hear that Parks was caught up in these events on accident, but “she had spent her adult life looking for a way to make a difference” (Payne 127). She joined the NAACP, who then became the secretary. She wasn’t simply there by accident she was known by many bus drivers to not follow the segregation laws. Most of the time bus drivers wouldn’t even stop to pick her up. These events are what have gotten us to the way we are today whites are more accepting of Black people and we have a lot of interracial relationships that we didn’t used to have. It’s not frowned upon anymore. We don’t have laws to segregate or discriminate black people. If all these people didn’t do what they did (Delaine, Houston etc.) We probably wouldn’t have had all these changes in …show more content…
Houston, Delaine, Clark did everything that Rosa Parks did but you have never heard of these names. Why didn’t they get more recognition? This is what Payne wants us to see. He wants us to realize that these people worked just as hard as everyone else but didn’t get the credit. They were just as much help in the movement as Martin Luther King Jr. was and more. Rosa parks was doing this to make a difference and so was everyone else that went along this journey with her. ”Placing so much emphasis on national leadership and national institutions minimized the importance of local struggle and makes it difficult to appreciate the role “ordinary” people played in changing the country and the enormous personal costs that sometimes entailed for them” (Payne