How would you feel if when you went to school each day you were settling for less because you didn't have a choice, or when you wanted to get a drink of water you had to find a special lower quality fountain because you weren't good enough to use the normal nice fountains that the whites got to use. There were many causes and effects for the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's, but I am going to focus on a few main points for each. .
One of the main reasons African-Americans started the civil rights movement was to show that they were not different than anyone else, and that they deserved the same rights and liberties as any one American. This is where the resistance began. Afro-American students began to realize how to harness the small power they had. They began holding demonstrations and marches which voiced their conviction s. Once this power began to show through the youth of the Afro-American culture, problems began.
As I noted in my introduction, blacks had to settle for less in more ways than one. One of those ways though, was through drinking fountains. Though a small inconvenience, it makes a big impact when the reasons behind it are so outrageous. Blacks were looked at as dirty and different people. The white people surely did not want to share a drinking fountain with these animals. The drinking fountains were just the spout of the segregation problems.
One of the most common places to find a drinking fountain is in a school, whether it be a grammar school or a high school. Once the segregation ball was set in motion it was tough to stop. In many schools across the southern and mid-western United States white kids were exhibiting behaviors which we would call outrageous today. They would spit on them, beat and maim them, throw things at them, and call out at them. This was normal behavior in the south during the civil rights period. The African Americans soon tired of settling for shoddy schools and education for their children.