The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights movement did not start with the labor movement, but has been an ongoing process since the beginning of the institution of slavery. The conflict that was the focus of the movement was created by the obvious differences in the social and economic practices of American slavery and the associated establishment of racial oppression. The Judeo-Christian values relating to love and brotherhood coupled with the religious interpretations of equality and justice perceived by a Southern racist majority in the eighteenth-century South aided in slave owners’ justification of their inhumane actions. One of the social differences was the educational difference between slaves and their owners. The first civil rights victory can be attributed …show more content…
military during the late thirties and forties. The labor movement of the forties was the catalyst that helped to develop the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. The labor reform movement focused on creating economic equality for African Americans and the civil rights movement leaned more towards social equality. Towards the end of the sixties, the leaders of the labor movement and the civil rights movement joined forces, merging the two ideals. The two oldest and most prominent civil rights groups were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League. The NAACP was founded in 1909 as a means to establish a renaissance of the pre-Civil War era abolitionist sentiment.2 The Urban League was founded in 1910 to ease the transition process from the rural south to the urban north for the average southern black …show more content…
One stated that all men ages eighteen – thirty-six were eligible to volunteer and the other prohibited discrimination based on ethnic origin.7 The downside to this law was that the War Department was given final say in the decision regarding who was accepted into the military. With this authority, the Department put many tactics in place to prevent the military’s integration, the majority of which centered on the draft. One of which was an order sent to the daft boards of certain states on the east coast. This order asked these states to not include black men in the first draft. The Governor of Connecticut, Raymond Baldwin, threatened to expose the plan to the American public and his successor, Robert Hurley, was charged with the task of making sure that the War Department’s order to fill its draft with white men only was not fulfilled.8 Another tactic that prevented the inclusion of African Americans was the implementation of a literacy test. Government officials created this test on the basis that the majority of African Americans were illiterate due to unequal educational opportunities. These officials felt that a literacy test would be the best way to prevent blacks from joining the military because of their presumed inability to pass. While the literacy tests did achieve their goal in preventing African American