The Dream Goes On

How the fight for racial equality has developed

Natalie Delgado | Staff Writer

Thatcher Hoch | Staff Writer

While the civil rights movement is in our textbooks with black and white photography, the decades-long struggle wasn’t that long ago. Then it was a fight for social justice and equal rights mainly for African Americans and today it's a continued fight for racial equality.

After the civil war, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were supposed to guarantee equal rights for African Americans. Instead, black codes and Jim Crow laws maintained segregation between white people and people of color.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus. While 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was the first to be arrested for this “crime”, Rosa’s light skin and maturity made her a stronger strongspokes person for the movement. Soon after, the Atlanta minister Dr. Martin Luther King started to organize with the people and began by bus boycotting which led to the desegregation of buses. Dr. King soon became the face of the civil rights movement.

Brown v. Board of Education, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil rights Act of 1964, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 all made strides during the movement. How were these advancements made possible? Social Studies teacher Magan Harrell says, “I would say the biggest thing is that they organized. They started to make a big diference because they had their meetings, even though they had to do it in secret, they had a plan, and things were thought out.” Across the south sit-ins, boycotts, and protests began popping up everywhere. Freedom riders boarded buses and protests were peaceful but met by violent force from police, something that today the protesters of Black Lives Matter are not unfamiliar with. Hand in hand, hundreds of thousands of people marched on Washington and virtually everyone in America heard the “I have a dream speech”, 58 years ago. Dr. Martin Luther King said in his speech, “1963 is not an end, but the beginning.”

While the civil rights movement legally came to a close after MLK was assassinated on April 4th, and the Fair Housing Act was passed on April 11th, 1968 the fight for change was not over. “Technically, I would say it didn't end, because the civil rights movement was a movement for racial equality and to end discrimination and systemic racism and social injustice, and we're still doing that. The movement hasn’t ended, it's just the name that has changed. It is an ongoing, constant movement,” said Harrell.

In February 2012 Trayvon Martin was killed at the hands of police brutality but unfortunately was not the last nor the first. The killings of black and brown people were becoming a pattern. According to a study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police. As a result, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi established Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc. with the mission to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” Since its founding, there have been many protests fighting for social justice, while remembering those who died. Similar to the civil rights era, the majority of the protests were peaceful. “All of this is just a carry-over of the civil rights movement. People are still being stereotyped and profiled based on the color of their skin. We haven't dealt with the past yet to move forward,” said Harrell. People today are taking notes from the past and organizing effectively.

Although the movements share many similarities, a key diference is social media. During the civil rights movement, people had to wait around and hope that maybe one news reporter captured the moment. Today anyone can record and spread it to thousands in minutes. A video of a police ofcer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck spread around the world and united people around a common cause and influenced the weeks to come. Protesters around the country gathered together. Today with the power of social media the cause has risen into major news outlets and opened important conversations. We haven’t seen any major changes despite the movement being around since 2013. Are people making a diference? Harrell says, “I think some are. For some people it was like a light bulb went of, and they're starting to see injustice, and they're using their platform, so I think that more people are doing the work. Education is the key. And if you don't educate yourself on the issues, and if you don’t have a why or a purpose, then it's people like that who are not making a diference.”

The Civil Rights movement was a fight for social justice and equality. Although we see the movement as the past, the fight for social justice and racial inequality has progressed into Black Lives Matter in our world today. Strides have been made, but there is still so much work to be done.