Website Project and Civil Rights Movement - Essay Example

Website project News reports from the United s in recent weeks have shown thousands and thousands of immigrants marching in the streets of some of its larger cities, protesting that they deserve specific rights just because they’re working here. More than just filling the streets, the last time they were on the news, it was reported that many of them had not shown up to work that day and refused to do any shopping to indicate the type of impact they would have if they weren’t there. To some extent, it seemed this part of the plan backfired as it was reported that it was mostly just the Hispanic small businesses that were forced to close. According to the people involved in the protest marches, a lot of these protests are trying to make it easier for illegal immigrants to become citizens so that they can share in the civil rights laws that were created the last time large groups of ethnic people gathered together. This peaceful, yet attention-getting response by such large numbers of people on the city streets made the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s stand out in even greater detail as a significant period in US History. While searching, I found a student’s website that detailed a lot of information about African American history, including an entire chapter devoted exclusively to the Civil Rights Movement. Based upon what had already been learned, the African American History website seemed well-researched and informed for this project. Unlike many of the other websites that I went to, this one actually provided me with much of the information I think it would be important to know in terms of the Civil Rights Movement as well as the documentation to back it up. Not only did the author of the site provide her name, affiliations, and other information necessary for a complete bibliographical entry, but for each section of the site, she indicated when and why this section was written so that her readers would have a good idea of her experience and expertise level at that period in time. These are things that are not normally included as a part of the website features, which automatically excluded several websites I found during my search that might have contained the same information, but were not as well organized or documented. In addition, throughout each essay within the site, the author made sure to keep her own bibliographic references as part of the page, so that her information could be verified from the original source or so that I, as a reader, could go find out more information about that particular aspect of the movement. This was very helpful since I could then check out the books from the library if I wanted. It also gave her website more authority since I knew some of the names that had written the books, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Roberta Hughes Wright, probably had a pretty good idea of what was happening during those times. The other thing that caused this website to stand out was that it didn’t focus on just one aspect of the Civil Rights Movement, but instead provided a lot of detailed information on several events that occurred during this period in American history. The chapter on Civil Rights was broken down into seven sections, each covering a different component of the movement. Section headings included the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, the March on Washington, Mississippi and Freedom Summer and Selma. These headings alone remind the reader that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t a single event and it didn’t happen in a single location. At the same time, it provided detailed information about those aspects of the movement that people might have forgotten about in the intervening years, such as what happened during Freedom Summer when the African Americans struggled so hard to act upon their right to vote. Other peaceful protests such as the sit-ins and the March on Washington, look a lot like the movements currently happening in American streets with the Hispanic Americans and other immigrants. At the same time that these headings remind people of the variety, depth and distribution of the movement, they only provide enough information to make a person curious when they come across a heading they might not remember, or they might remember the events, but not necessarily the place, such as the title of Selma, which covers the events leading up to a march from Selma to Montgomery in an effort to remove obstacles that had been put in place that kept black people from registering to vote or making their voices heard in the vote. This section on Selma, Alabama was actually very informative as I hadn’t really understood a lot of what happened there. The author of this website, Lisa Cozzens, organized the entire chapter on Civil Rights chronologically, and each section within it is also written chronologically, which enables a reader to get a sense of how each event built on the last and led into the next. In Selma, she discusses how the black people in Alabama were just as suppressed as the black people in Mississippi in terms of trying to exercise their rights to vote. Just like in Mississippi, they were given aptitude tests that were impossible to pass, but that they had to pass in order to be allowed to cast their ballot. Even if they did pass, they were often threatened with violence if they dared to step close to the ballot box. More than just talking about how the schoolteachers, who usually avoided participation in the movement for fear of school board retaliation, participated in a march of their own to demonstrate that the claims that black people were not educated enough to make decisions at election time, Cozzens talks about the cruelty and brutality of the sheriff of Selma at the time, who used clubs to force women to the street to arrest them and led students participating in a peaceful sit-in demonstration on the courthouse steps in a forced march that left many of them so exhausted that they were left vomiting. These images of children in such a bad state as the result of Sheriff Clark’s actions brought many white people into the movement who had remained separated before. It’s interesting to note that it was the plight of the children that brought the white people into the movement. It was also interesting to learn some of the details regarding the sit-ins that the students staged. The ‘dos and don’ts’ that the students had written up in Nashville speak loudly about how respectful the students wanted to be, they wanted to do something peaceful and normal and they wanted to make sure that their actions could not be misunderstood in any way. One of the don’ts was that they weren’t supposed to hold conversations with each other. It’s difficult to understand how two people having a simple conversation with each other might be construed to incite violence. After thinking about it for a while, though, it seems that there would have to be too many restrictions on what topics might be appropriate topics for conversation and what topics might be able to be pulled out of context by an eavesdropping white patron. It might also lead to greater relaxation on the part of the students, making it easier for them to drop their guard to ensure that they stay polite and respectful throughout the afternoon. To pass the time, they would study their college books, which further indicated that blacks were too stupid or uneducated to be given the vote. Knowing that, it’s interesting to learn that it was also in Nashville that the first actions of violence arose when white boys attacked the students. The story becomes outrageous, though, when the police arrived and allowed the white boys to leave and arrested the black boys for causing a civil disturbance and then the judge literally turned his back on their lawyer. These kinds of details make it easier to understand why white people in the north would be interested in fighting for the civil rights of black people in the south. It is because of detailed information like what was provided in these two articles that makes this site really worth a visit. Although parts of it were written by a young student, it all seems very well researched and citations are provided so anyone can verify the information or learn more about some of the things being mentioned. The articles are easy to read even though they are placed on a gray background, but I think that makes it better without as much glare. Cozzens even provides quick links to the references for each statement, so if you want to know where a quote came from, you just have to click on the number at the end of the quote and you can go find the book in the library. Because she presents everything in chronological order, she makes it much easier to understand how the civil rights movement started, became a series of peaceful demonstrations that were started by a few and repeated by many, that served to incite violent reactions from white southerners which brought out the indignant reactions of white northerners and southerners who were appalled at these actions and finally forced through significant change. Works Cited Cozzens, Lisa. Welcome to African American History. May 11, 1999. Watson. May 5, 2006 Read More