r the social, economical, and political equality for blacks. The reason the battle for civil rights picked up so much support was because the 1960s saw America’s strongest period of liberalism. This strong liberalism greatly helped the African American cause. However, the biggest factor in this great social change was the influence of black civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In the atmosphere of the 1960s these men were very effective fighting for black civil rights. The 1960s were a very productive decade in the advancement black civil rights. The Movement Gets Started In order to tell the story of civil rights in the 1960s one must go back even further to see what got the ball rolling. On May 17, l954, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court declared that separate educational facilities were "inherently unequal." This ruling was the spark that ignited the civil rights movement to follow. The next year, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a member of the Montgomery, Alabama, branch of the NAACP, was told to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person. She wouldn’t budge and was promptly arrested for refusing to move. The local NAACP, led by Edgar D. Nixon, realized that the arrest of Parks might rally local blacks to protest segregated buses. Montgomery's black community had always been upset about the rude treatment they received on the buses. The community had previously considered a boycott of the buses, and the incident with Parks was enough to get one started. The next day one was organized. The Montgomery bus boycott was an immediate success, with virtually unanimous support from the 50,000 blacks in Montgomery. It lasted for more than a year and dramatized to the American public the determination of blacks in the South to end segregation. A federal court ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated in November 1956, and the boycott ended in triumph. Thi...
