The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil rights Movement has opened my eyes to the way that the minority population was treated. Every man is supposed to be created equal but with the way people were thinking in the south it surely did not look that way. It was just amazing how all of the black people came together and started fighting to get treated fairly. The Civil Rights Movement has taught me many lessons. First off it doesn’t matter how many people you start out with if you are fighting for something you will have people join you along the way. Another lesson I learned is if you want something you just need to go for it. Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he was tired of being treated the way he was being treated and he did something about it and was one of the most important factors to the movement.

America still struggles with racism and equality issues. The biggest issue today is Institutional racism. If you are a black male and are convicted of a crime you have a higher chance of getting proven guilty and also getting a longer sentence than a white male would for committing the same crime. This shows that society may seem not racist but they are. We may have not achieved equality or equity yet but we are most definitely on our way. Another big problem that we have today is that the rich seem to be getting richer and the poor seem to be getting poorer and the middle class is just staying the same.

The events and ideas of The Civil Rights Movement are connected to the present greatly. If The Civil Rights Movement did not happen we would still have segregated schools and a lot of our population would not exist at all. Another idea is the idea of non-violent protests. The Occupy Oakland protest just shows you how people took the knowledge that they learned from the Movement and applied it to modern day. We can only reach total equality if people want it and even today there are a lot of people that just don’t want it.