Effective black organisations Flashcards
Topic sentence
Some historians argue that effective black organisations were fundamental in the development of the Civil rights movement after 1945.
Knowledge 1
Black Americans that if they allowed the progress of their civil rights to wait on the actions of the federal government it would be slow and limited. By the 1940s the National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) was gaining popularity and was cooperating with other groups in an emergent civil rights coalition which successfully achieved the desegregation of schools due to the Brown Versus Topeka Ruling of the Supreme Court in 1954.
Analysis 1
This led to the growth of the civil rights movement because their long lasting efforts to challenge the system of segregation through the courts meant that they started to come to the realisation of troubles faced by Black Americans and this led to further legislative victories which had a positive impact on Black peoples rights.
Evidence 2
Other organisations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were also gaining popularity during this time. They were established by Martin Luther King in 1957 and as an organisation used they non-violent tactics to improve the black situation in the South.
Analysis 2
This led to the growth of the civil rights movement because the SCLC helped gain publicity to the movement through their non-violent tactics. For example they organised a march outside the Lincoln Memorial in 1957 which gained maximum publicity for little work.
Counter Analysis
However, historians debate over the significance of the Brown ruling as a prompting factor for the civil rights movement as they argue that the process of taking down segregation would take more than this.
Evaluation
To evaluate, before 1941 Black civil rights organisations held differing views which meant that there was no unified movement to challenge inequality in the USA, despite this it is clear that organisations became more effective in the development of civil rights throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, historians debate the importance of different civil rights groups as Mark Newman states that the SCLC “assisted rather than initiated” many of the protests in the 1950s and 1960s, saying that the credit should go to the number of participants rather than to any one of the organisations.
