A Summary of the Civil Rights Movement

The Modern Civil Rights Movement can be traced back to the arrival of blacks in America as slaves in 1619, through the questions of slavery pondered (and ultimately avoided) by the Founding Fathers, into the increasing rancor of the 19th century and the abolitionist movements and the rise to prominence of such black luminaries as Frederick Douglass. The questions of civil rights was obviously a profound aspect of the Civil War, and an animating aspect of Reconstruction. In the earlier twentieth century, the battle was waged by men like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, though the two differed powerfully and angrily in their ideas.…