Civil Rights Movement Research Paper

Professor Charles E. Cobb Jr., an important Civil Rights activist during the 1960’s and renown journalist, “is very much concerned with how the history of the . . . civil rights movement is portrayed.” History is never as accurate as we believe it to be; it is never as accurate as it should be. History relies upon and creates memories of the past. We depend on middle men such as text books and even teachers to relay information onto us. This can be compared to a game of “telephone”, a game in which one person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Nine times out of ten the original message ends up distorted and in some cases does not resemble …show more content…
These terrorists share the name of the Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War. They erroneously use the name of this group of American heroes in order to mask their true terroristic intentions and pose as patriots defending their own freedoms. In actuality, these sorry excuses for men formed mobs made up of Klansmen and uniformed police alike that hunted non-violent Civil Rights activists with the goal of essentially bullying African Americans into suppression. The actions of white supremacists such as these called for the creation of groups such as the Deacons for Defense: a group that began in rural Louisiana in order to protect African American communities from the Ku Klux Klan. These activists were advocates of armed resistance and could often be found “guarding restaurants where local black residents dined, setting up armed patrols in order to monitor police brutality and providing escorts for out-of-town civil rights workers. While these workers did no always condone the Deacons’ methods, many privately admitted that they would have been killed if not for their help.” Advocates of armed resistance could even be found protecting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charles Cobb stated that there “were always people around Martin Luther King with weapons prepared to use them. Remember, when …show more content…
For this reason, activists had no choice but to suffocate these “lukewarm [accepters]” and give them the chaos that they desperately avoided. The lack of peace that was created forced these undecided individuals to understand that changes needed to be made in America, and that they would not obtain the order that they were so devoted to until African Americans obtained the rights and freedoms which they fought for. Riots took place across the country from Harlem in New York to Watts in Los Angeles. These riots and the disorder that they brought “did not erupt as a result of a single . . . incident. Instead, [they were] generated out of an increasingly disturbed social