Research Paper

Ramel Davis

    A Reform Movement is a type of Social Movement in which that people want to change a specific facet of society , and they have been an important part of United States history. There have been many different movements throughout the United States. Movements such as the abolitionist  movement, Progressive movement, civil rights movement , and more.

 Many important events involving discrimination against African Americans proceeded the era known as the Civil Rights Movement. The importation and enslavement of Africans is perhaps the most notorious example of inhumanity in United States history. The abolishment of slavery did not change the perceptions that allowed discrimination to continue.

The Civil Rights Movement was an era dedicated to activism for equal rights and treatment of African Americans in the United States. During this period, people rallied for social, legal, political and cultural changes to prohibit discrimination and end segregation.Civil rights are defined as "the nonpolitical rights of a citizen; especially those guaranteed to U.S. citizens by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution and by acts of Congress". The success of the movement for African American civil rights across the South in the 1960s has largely been credited to activists who adopted the strategy of nonviolent protest. Leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Jim Lawson, and John Lewis believed wholeheartedly in this philosophy as a way of life, and studied how it had been used successfully by Mahatma Gandhi to protest inequality in India.

They tried to literally “love your enemies” and practiced pacifism in all circumstances. But other activists were reluctant to devote their lives to nonviolence, and instead saw it as simply a tactic that could be used at marches and sit-ins to gain sympathy for their cause and hopefully change the attitudes of those who physically attacked them. Many interviewees in the Civil Rights History Project discuss their own personal views of nonviolence and how they grappled with it in the face of the daily threats to their lives.

  The Civil Rights Movement also drew children, teenagers, and young adults into a maelstrom of meetings, marches, violence, and in some cases, imprisonment. Why did so many young people decide to become activists for social justice? “The Movement was the most exciting thing that one could engage in.  I often say that, in fact, I coined the term, the ‘Emmett Till generation.’  I said that there was no more exciting time to have been born at the time and the place and to the parents that movement, young movement, people were born to… I remember so clearly Uncle Archie who was in World War I, went to France, and he always told us, ‘Your generation is going to change things.’”