Civil Rights and Black Lives: The Movements that Matter

The year is 1965. The Civil Rights Act had been passed for over a year; legally, a person in America could not be discriminated against in jobs, social settings, and schools.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been passed, and all minorities could legally participate in America’s system of democracy.
Rather, these pieces of legislature and gradual social developments were the result of an impassioned fight that lasted for over ten years. This fight was led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X.
Nearly fifty years later, the year is 2013. A year before, a young, unarmed African-American boy is shot and killed in Florida. His executioner is a neighborhood watch volunteer who had no reason to engage the young man at all; the boy had only been walking through the neighbourhood on his way home from a snack run.
Despite the obvious evidence of an unlawful killing, the murderer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted of all charges.
The nation watches in abject horror, outrage erupts across the country, and thousands of shocked people question the reasons why the tragic ending of such an innocent life received no justice.
In response, the internet hashtag “#Black Lives Matter” begins circulating around social media platforms. The hashtag soon personifies into a fully fledged physical movement that manifests in the streets.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 60s was the true beginning of finding social equality for a race of people that had been oppressed in America for centuries.
It was the end of the one hundred year-long period that begun after the slaves had been emancipated, in which the African-Americans were free in the most minimal sense of the word.
During this time, pioneers of the Civil Rights movement had to fight to secure basic rights that are guaranteed to white citizens.
“They really worked for the right to vote, and for integration, and for stuff like that to improve the black quality of life,” observed freshman, Biology major from San Francisco, California, William Waddell.
With this fight, political work was a key component to the movement, as securing legislation was necessary to prevent racism from impeding African-American progress.
However, the subject of Black Lives Matter is more nuanced. While African-Americans technically have all of the same political rights as everyone else, there are still numerous social discrepancies to be addressed in American society.
According to the Black Lives Matter webpage, the goal of the movement is to “build local power and to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes…We are working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise.”
A double major in physics and mathematics, Karriem Upshaw, elaborated on the cause. “Basically, saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ means that you want to acknowledge the fact that we are people who don’t deserve to be killed by people like police, and we deserve justice if we do.”