Oppressed no Longer essays

Oppressed no Longer essays Martin Luther King, Jr. was an ordained minister and civil rights leader. King demonstrations and actions from 1958- 1968 opened up opportunities for African Americans who in the South were prohibited from sitting in certain sections of buses, using facilities such as water fountains, and sitting at lunch counters with whites. These laws were unjust and unconstitutional, and they were not challenged by local authorities. King decided to take action because he, as well as the other million African Americans in the United States were tied of bring oppressed. African Americans had been kept down by unjust use of force for hundreds of years, and without Kings actions we still would be oppressed. In the early sixties, the movement for civil rights for African Americans had become a national issue. King led several campaigns in the country to help end segregation. For all King did to free blacks from the yoke of segregation, whites may owe him the greatest debt for liberating them from the burden of Americas centuries of old beliefs about race. Had he and the blacks and whites who marched beside him failed, vast regions of the United States would have remained morally indistinguishable from South Africa under apartheid, with terrible consequences for Americas standing among nations. Before King and his movement Rosa Parks could be thrown into jail and fined simply because she refused to give up her seat on a Alabama bus so a white man could sit down, or how about when a fourteen year old black boy name Emmett Till was hunted down and murdered because he supposedly made suggestive remarks to a white woman. Dont forget about the six year old little black girl, Ruby Bridges who was spit on by a white New Orleans mob simply because she wanted to go to school with white children. Even highly educated blacks were routinely denied the right to vote or serve on juries. We could not eat at lunch counters, register in mote...