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Both the black civil rights and the women’s rights movements had a similar goal in mind: create opportunities for their groups that were as equal as the majority had, and to end discrimination against them and enforce constitutional voting rights to them. These two movements had to deal with the question of how one goes about pursuing such opportunities effectively. In this essay my goal is to compare and contrast the effectiveness of the methods used in both the black civil rights and the women’s rights movements.
These two movements were characterized by major campaigns of civil resistance. Acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience produced crisis situations between activists and government authorities. Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, and communities often had to respond immediately to these situations that highlighted the inequities face by these two movements. Forms of protests and disobedience included boycotts, marches, of course, the woman’s suffrage and a wide range of other nonviolent activities.
The movement within the larger Civil Rights Movement (which started with the Brown v. Board of Ed. uling and moved through desegregation in public facilities up the voting rights act) that I want discuss first is the Selma to Montgomery march that Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr. helped organize. Through the years of struggle the government proved unable to secure civil rights for Black people, and so activists started to take matters into their own hands in the early 1960’s.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began the Selma voting rights campaign, which was to get blacks registered to vote. As the campaign tarted running out of money SCLC and MLK moved in to take it over and worked on continuing. The Selma to Montgomery march was in response to white murders of blacks. They proceeded with the march even when the governor ordered to stop, and as such were met with immense violence from law enforcement.
Following pre-march training most marchers kept to strictly nonviolent behavior, and those that use violence got talked into understanding how nonsensical and suicidal violence is. It was after this violence that the SNCC was on board with the march to help combat uch violence in the future. However, shortly after SNCC pulled its support and started organizing in Montgomery. The women’s movement was initially fueled by Black Civil Rights Movement and then by the broader social upheaval.
In contrast with the blacks, women were primarily well-educated by older white women of the middle-to-upper class who were in professional positions. The women’s movement used so many of the same strategies and methods as the Civil Rights Movement. In 1969, the media caught on to the movement and brought a wider audience into that in purpose created more omentum to get their goals. The opportunities for women in higher education expanded, as did their visibility in public. The movement, fueled by the successes, renewed a push for an Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution.
Two opponents deserved more while Sam Ervin opposed the amendment because he thought god made women less capable than men. The work of the women movement started to merge with the work of the civil rights movement, as both movements were seeking similar rights for their respective groups. Blacks were largely the group violently ushed back against, and the group for which affirmative action was initially formed, but both movements were met with similar opposition as they played out at the same time.
Overall, I think that in contrast to women, black men suffered even more because after they succeeded in their rights movement they were still in disadvantage because some of them were not able to read, write, and in some cases to speak, so they would still have some disadvantages. An advantage for women was that they were well educated, and they knew and were capable of doing the exact ame thing men could do, and sometimes even better. Women were treated as trash and so blacks were.
In my opinion, as a women and human being, I feel extremely proud of these two movements especially for the women suffrage because they were such a brave women that this world needs. I think that if I would have been in that same time, I would have been part of those movements to find equal rights to every citizen regardless of race, gender, age, disability, and education. References page http://www. history. com/topics/the-fght-for-womens-suffrage http://www. history. com/topics/civil-rights-movement