Research paper

The civil rights movement is one of America’s biggest and most impactful movements

among the population of our country. Civil rights changed the lives of black and white

communities across the country. This movement allowed black people to exercise some of their

civic duties that people in their communities kept them from doing due to the color of their skin.

However, lots of people were not happy with how these new changes were going to be affecting

them. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the effects of desegregation and the Civil Rights

Movement on southern areas and the reactions that followed.

The civil rights movement started in 1954 and ran throughout 1968. One of the most

well-known court cases from this time was Brown vs Board. This case dealt with the

desegregation of public schools and the clause or separate but equal and how it was not actually

working. In an interview that was conducted between myself and my grandmother, Yvonne. She

states that the schools were very much not equal. She said that her school would get all of the

new items such as books, sports uniforms, and equipment, school trays, etc. while their

segregated school would get all of the old items that were very old and quite tattered. This was

brought up in the case in the sense that the fact that they were separate made them not equal.

These students at black-only schools were simply not treated the same because they were not

allowed in the same school as the white children.

IN public school systems, most areas had segregated schools for each county. There were

usually multiple high schools and white students would attend the newer high school. While

talking with a student of a formerly segregated school, she stated that she and her siblings always

felt bad for the black students of their community because there were very obvious issues in the

thought that they were considered “equal”. This student said that their school wasn’t the best
high school, it was quite old and run down. However, the high school for the black students in

their community was a previous elementary school that had been closed for many years before

they opened it and tried to clean it up for those students. This high school had lots of issues with

mold and pest control. She said that the ceilings were very leaky. Segregation of schools was

ruled unconstitutional on May 17th, 1954 because of the brown vs board supreme court ruling.

However, in North Carolina, the percentage of black students who attended desegregated schools

didn’t rise above 1% until 1964 when the Civil Rights act was passed. Charlotte NC shocked the

Country for voluntarily desegregating the city a whole year before the Civil Rights Act was

passed. My grandmother said, “Living close to Charlotte, we saw lots of angry people protesting

the desegregation. My mother never minded what color friends we had, but I had quite a few

friends whose parents didn’t agree with my mother. I lost lots of friends in my neighborhood due

to my family’s belief that we need to love everyone.” My grandmother grew up in a very white-

dominated town that was considered a very religious and conservative town. Lots of the people

around did not agree with desegregation, and in earlier years there were even Klan meetings near

their house.

My grandmother’s family was very loving and compassionate of all people, despite what

they were surrounded by. My grandmother grew up quite poor and her father worked at the

factory they had in their town, along with a lot of the other kids that went to school with her. The

richer kids that lived in her area were very hateful towards the poor children and the black

children she said. “They would show up to our houses after school while our parents were at

work and take our toys from our yard because they knew we couldn’t afford to replace them.”

They all went to the same school after the desegregation and she said that children still got

picked on in school but normally it was not for their race, it was for their standpoint on the
financial ladder. “Most children that got bullied or picked on, we were made fun of because they

were poor. People used to pick on my brothers and I because our mother made all of our clothes,

and I had a boy hair cut because she didn’t have the money for products for my curly hair.” She

said that as they got older most of the people who were mean to all of the students for being

poor, grew out of that mindset.

My grandmother said that although there were not really issues in her school, the

surrounding schools had lots of issues about the desegregation of their schools. These students

were very hostile and tried to fight back against the black students now attending their school.

My grandmother said that sometimes they would go out on Friday nights where these black

students would hang out and beat them up, just because they wanted to. My grandmother was on

a date one night with her first boyfriend and they were at a drive-in, when a group of boys from

this other school went up to a car with a black gentleman who went to my grandmother’s school.

She said that they dragged him out of the car and just started punching him. She said that his

girlfriend was screaming and trying to get them off and they shoved her. Luckily, lots of boys

from my grandmother’s school went and pulled these boys off of him. But the fact that this even

happened was just a really sad thing. Growing up they would see things like this and sometimes

someone would help, and sometimes they would. It is very sad that things like this happened and

a lot of the time no one did anything about it.

At my school in the middle of nowhere, we have had lots of similar experiences with

people of all different backgrounds. Racism was still very prominent at my school and lots of the

time the students who acted this way, were never reprimanded. There was a student in my history

class who used to yell awful things such as “Cotton picker” and the N-word to black students

while we were in class. This was in 2018-2020. People who would act this way in school not
only were not reprimanded but a lot of the time the teacher would take up for them and talk

about how great of a student they were. But being a good student does not excuse racism. They

would constantly call other students different slurs from whatever race they were, and would

even sit and yell incredibly sexist things to us girls in the middle of class. During the 2016

election, when Donald Trump was announced as the winner of the election, these students told a

Hispanic girl in our class that “finally her and her family would be deported”. These types of

behaviors, back then and now, are never okay. Black students today are still given improper

treatment compared to their fellow students and it can be seen in many different areas such as:

the way they are treated by fellow students, the way they are treated by their teachers, the way

they are treated on sports teams by their coaches and fellow teammates. These things are not as

bad as they used to be, but they should be fixed by now. Behaviors that involve such vulgar

behaviors should be taken care of in a proper fashion.

Segregation was an issue that was and still is something that needs to be addressed.

Whether we want to believe it or not segregation and racial bias are still major concerns in our

world today. Most people blame their beliefs or the way they view the world on where they grew

up and how they were raised, but you don’t have to be the person you were raised to be. All

humans are created equal and we need to get to a point as a society that we see ourselves and

each other that way. The world feels like it is slowly falling to pieces in 2020 with everything

that has been going on. Instead of being a support system for each other, people are fighting and

segregating themselves from one another. Our black community has been through enough in the

past and they just want to be treated and viewed the same way as everyone else is. It is our job,

as it was back in the day, to use the privilege that we hold to help these folks get the equality and

treatment they deserve.

 Citations

Leland Ware, Civil Rights and the 1960s: A Decade of Unparalleled Progress, 72 Md. L. Rev. 1087 (2013) Available at:

http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlr/vol72/iss4/4

My grandmother