The Truly Prolonged African American Experience in Miami.
How strange it all seems now equality. People had to fight for it? Kill for it? Go to court to defend it? Not too long ago, it was all true and clearly evident in any regular functioning day. The issue of equality has taken our entire nation and turned it upside down in mid 1950s. Focusing primarily on a Miami region but definitely not limited to within this document, the Civil Rights of African Americans has been a painfully long and hardly enduring struggle in the United States history. The movement was initially advanced through the amendment process, an essential method of change in our government. The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments furthered the development of Civil Rights by abolishing slavery, defining and extending citizenship and granting suffrage to African Americans during Reconstruction. When Reconstruction ended, many of the advances were lost as segregation took its route throughout the United States. The decisions in Supreme Courts such as Plessy vs. Ferguson and the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision all played key roles in our American Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement in Miami was a legal, political and socioeconomic struggle of the African Americans to gain full citizenship rights and to achieve racial equality. .
It is important to realize that the Civil Rights Movement did not happen overnight. Prior to the civil rights movement in Dade County, black people were essentially second-class citizens. Relations between black and white people in Dade County were cordial, as long as black people understood that they were not the social equals of whites. The "Whites Only" signs, as prevalent in Miami as they were in other southern cities, stood everywhere as reminders in case someone forgot. African Americans could not use public parks and other facilities. They could not vote in the Democratic primary.