Civil rights- english final. Leilah McIntosh & Mia Avila

The podcast episode discusses the Civil Rights Movement and its key events. It starts with the Jim Crow Laws, which enforced racial segregation in the South. These laws made it difficult for African Americans to vote and limited their access to public spaces. The podcast highlights the importance of the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to former slaves. However, many Southern states did not recognize or enforce this amendment. The Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 declared segregation in schools unconstitutional, leading to the desegregation of schools. Despite this progress, racial tensions and violence persisted, as seen in the Emmett Till case. The podcast concludes by mentioning that the Civil Rights Movement is a complex and ongoing struggle for equality. Hello and welcome to our podcast, Voices of Equality, we are Laila McIntosh and Laila Abouba and we talk about various social justice issues, history and advocacy on our channel. During today's episode, we will be talking about civil rights, more specifically the Civil Rights Movement. Be sure to check out some of our other episodes if you enjoy this one. As most of you know, this was one of the most important or even the most important movement in history, which started when African Americans started to stand up for themselves and protect their rights. This timeline may be confusing, so we will try to make the ideas more clear. Now, we will start with the Jim Crow Laws. Using evidence from the History Channel, we can gather that during Reconstruction, the Southern states implemented rules that essentially prevented black people from the freedom that they had just gained after being policed for hundreds of years. The states then created laws that separated blacks from restaurants, hotels, theaters and almost everything you can think of. This was legitimized by the Supreme Court, called Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which said that separate but equal is not. So, they made laws around that. But, it is saddening, especially after adding the 14th Amendment, which made clear that citizenship was to be bestowed upon free slaves. This is why there is the whole saying, separate but equal. This is obviously not true, because they are not really equal. Anyways, with the confirmation of what the 14th Amendment is by Cornell University, we can conclude that the problem with the 14th Amendment is that it was never officially made valid by most of the Southern states. So, during the Reconstruction period, the South actually had military members who came to oversee that they were upholding universal male suffrage, and they weren't. And the problem with the Jim Crow laws, which were mentioned earlier, was that they made things harder for black men, more specifically in the voting area. This is because when they would get to the voting booth, they were hit with voting taxes, literacy tasks, and much more to prevent them from voting. This is so that they cannot participate in what is happening in society. This obviously put African Americans at a disadvantage because they were deprived of things such as an education, which is part of the reason why they could not vote as well. This shows that the Southerners knew precisely what they were doing wrong. Also, it wasn't just about voting, but also Southern states banned things like interracial marriages and segregated public spaces, such as schools, parks, and different modes of transportation. And I'm sure you listeners are familiar with the Rosa Parks story, and we also know that there were serious threats against black people, such as lynching and the Ku Klux Klan during that time. And the problem with this is that when they would go to court, they were with a white judge and a white jury, so in a way, would barely, or in some cases, not even be punished at all. So it was just a constant cycle of white supremacists being innocent, even when committing murder. Then, in 1954, there was the Brown v. Board of Education case, in which essentially proved that they were separate, but definitely unequal, which obviously violates the 14th Amendment. And the thing about these historic cases was really the people behind them. Like, again, with the Brown v. Board of Education, which you listeners have probably heard of here and there, that the backstory is an 8-year-old girl, Linda Brown, and she had to ride a school bus about 5 miles to a segregated school from her own hometown. Meanwhile, a school for white children was just a few blocks away from her house, and it was better staffed, had better equipment, better books, and things like that. So her father wanted to try to enroll her in that school, but he was denied. So he went to the NAACP, and they essentially kept taking the case even further, and even got the families involved to help the case as well. And again, this was ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson as separate, not equal. And this was a very important example of why it is not, especially comparing the two schools side by side, what the children were entitled to and the education they were getting. It couldn't be more obvious that they were unequal. Honestly, that is so right. And it delivered a sort of blow against Plessy because there were more cases beforehand that started to chip away at Plessy, and an example of this is the case in 1946 on interstate bus travel. Anyway, when Brown and the NAACP appealed the local judges' decision, that was when they said that separate but equal is confirmed as unconstitutional. This then began the desegregation of schools. And obviously, this was a major step in the civil rights movement, but it didn't immediately make things better. If anything, it made hostilities worse, in the South at least, between blacks and whites. An example of this is the Emmett Till case, an extremely saddening case, which happened a few months after the decision that separate but equal is unconstitutional. And this involved a 14-year-old African American boy who lived in Chicago at the time and was visiting a relative in Mississippi. He was there for a few days, and he was hanging out with his friends outside of the store, and he showed them pictures of this white girl and said, like, oh, this is my girlfriend, blah, blah, blah, and they didn't believe him. And so they go tell him that he should go flirt with this white girl in the store there. And so he did, and this is what caused a lot of problems. And it really did cause a lot of problems, because just a couple nights later, he was kidnapped from the house he was staying at, and he disappeared. And so his body was found drowned in a river a few days later, and there was barbed wire around his neck and a bullet hole in his skull, and was so badly mutilated and tortured that his body was completely unrecognizable, except for a ring he was wearing, and that is how they identified him. And it was very obvious who and why this murder happened. Somebody was knocking on the door in the middle of the night, asking to see the boy and his uncle. The person was visiting, couldn't resist them. Then it was the husband, who the girl Emmett had been flirting with. He had come back from a trip and found out what happened and heard the story, and immediately went over and took the boy and put him in the car and drove away. And honestly, it is hard to determine what Emmett had actually said to the girl, but it was believed that he said something along the lines of, bye bye baby, when he turned to leave. And again, this is an example of an all-white jury not finding the guilty parties guilty. And if you look at pictures from the court, the suspects were looking nonchalant and perfectly fine about the whole thing, as though he had no care in the world because he knew he would get no punishment. And the mother of Emmett was heartbroken. At his funeral, she very much insisted an open casket. And again, his body was so mutilated that it was barely recognizable and must have been such a horrific sight to see. And I think that is what stirred especially the younger generations at the time of black Americans to say this is wrong. Even though it was wrong, all along it is a big difference going from a girl being denied entrance to a school to this very violent atrocity that happened. And this really awakened the nation, because I remember reading about his mutilated body being printed out in a magazine at the time. So not even just the people who went and saw his body in person, but all around the country, people who bought that magazine could see how disgusting this was. It is also interesting at the same time to compare Emmett to himself growing up in Chicago, which was really different than the ways of the South, and a completely different set of rules there. And it really illustrated the difference for everyone. Also, how not even a teenage boy is safe from violence. Even though this obviously is not everything about the Civil Rights Movement, it is some of the main parts. Everything that happened back then contributed to the movement, because everything back then was terrible for black people. Now, next episode, we will be talking about the Civil Rights Movement again, the second part. Stay tuned, because we also have a special guest speaker with us, who I will be really excited about. And that's it for today's episode. We hope you enjoyed, and make sure to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends. Once again, we are Voices of Equality, and I am Mia O'Neill. And I am Lenny Hagenfeld. Thank you.