They took the advice of nonviolence from a great leader named Martin Luther King Jr.(who will be talked about in later paragraphs). With these four men doing this each and every day they gained support of many other black students as well as some white students. These boys" actions started sit-ins in hundreds of cities. In the result of this act many blacks were arrested, beaten, jailed, deprived of their jobs, intimidated, and some even killed. With all this happening the government was forced to protect many black Americans and to guarantee them their rights. In order to enforce these rights federal legislations were passed, public facilities such as transportation and waiting rooms were now desegregated and blacks finally gained back their access to the polling booth. There have been some white people who have been involved in the civil rights movement such as a man named John Brown. He led a slave revolt and was considered a fanatic by other whites and a martyr by the people whose cause he campaigned. 1 A lot of whites that did help blacks in their struggle for freedom were intimidated and abused by others, but that never made them give up. In the Supreme court cases Plessy -vs- Ferguson and in the Brown case many of the decisions that were made combined to produce the Montgomery movement, which will be talked about in the following paragraph. Supreme Court decisions, as in the case of Brown vs. Topeka board of education of 1954, also helped in bringing the blacks one step closer to achieving their goals. The separate-but-equal doctrine was first established in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson that the separation of races is constitutional as long as equal accommodations are made for each race. The ruling in the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education overturned the Plessy ruling. It stated that separate educational facilities were unequal and unconstitutional.
