EOTO: Civil Rights Era

Today in my First Year Seminar class we held an "Each On Teach One" or EOTO. There were two groups who gave their presentations. The first group did events that were Anti-Civil Rights and the second group did events that were Pro-Civil Rights.

The group that went first was Anti-Civil Rights.They mentioned things like the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April of 1968, the assassination of Malcolm X in February of 1965 and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June of 1968. Two other events that were mentioned were The Watts Riot and the Little Rock 9. The Watts Riot was a large series of riots that broke out August 11, 1965, in the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles. The Watts Riots lasted for six days, resulting in 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries and 4,000 arrests, involving 34,000 people and ending in the destruction of 1,000 buildings, totaling $40 million in damages.The second of the two events was the Little Rock 9.The Little Rock were a group of nine black students who enrolled at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education. On the first day of classes at Central High, Governor Orval Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to block the black students’ entry into the high school. Later that month, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine into the school.

The second and last group presented their Pro-Civil Rights events. They mentioned things such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968,and

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Another two events were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 proposed by President John F. Kennedy,ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The other event was the Voting Rights Act of 1965.signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Voting Rights Act is considered one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.