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Voter registration organizing After the Freedom Rides, local black leaders in Mississippi such as Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers, and others asked SNCC to help register black voters and to build community organizations that could win a share of political power in the state. Since Mississippi ratified its new constitution in 1890 with provisions such as poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests, it made registration more complicated and stripped blacks from voter rolls and voting. Also, violence at the time of elections had earlier suppressed black voting.

By the mid-20th century, preventing blacks from voting had become an essential part of the culture of white supremacy. In June and July 1959, members of the black community in Fayette County, TN formed the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League to spur voting. At the time, there were 16,927 blacks in the county, yet only 17 of them had voted in the previous seven years. Within a year, some 1,400 blacks had registered, and the white community responded with harsh economic reprisals. Using registration rolls, the White Citizens Council circulated a blacklist of all registered black voters, allowing banks, local stores, and gas stations to conspire to deny registered black voters essential services. What's more, sharecropping blacks who registered to vote were getting evicted from their homes. All in all, the number of evictions came to 257 families, many of whom were forced to live in a makeshift Tent City for well over a year. Finally, in December 1960, the Justice Department invoked its powers authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to file a suit against seventy parties accused of violating the civil rights of black Fayette County citizens.[87] In the following year the first voter registration project in McComb and the surrounding counties in the Southwest corner of the state. Their efforts often met with violent repression from state and local lawmen, the White Citizens' Council, and the Ku Klux Klan. Activists beaten was commonplace, there were hundreds of arrests of local citizens, and the murder of voting activist Herbert Lee.[88]

White opposition to black voter registration was so intense in Mississippi that Freedom Movement activists concluded that all of the state's civil rights organizations had to unite in a coordinated effort to have any chance of success. In February 1962, representatives of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). At a subsequent meeting in August, SCLC became part of COFO.[89]

In the Spring of 1962, with funds from the Voter Education Project, SNCC/COFO began voter registration organizing in the Mississippi Delta area around Greenwood, and the regions surrounding Hattiesburg, Laurel, and Holly Springs. As in McComb, fierce opposition resulting in arrests, beatings, shootings, arson, and murder. Registrars used the literacy test to keep blacks off the voting rolls by creating standards that even highly educated people could not meet. Additionally, employers fired blacks who tried to register, and landlords evicted them from their rental homes.[90] Despite these actions, over the following years, the black voter registration campaign spread across the state.

Similar voter registration campaigns—with similar responses—were begun by SNCC, CORE, and SCLC in Louisiana, Alabama, southwest Georgia, and South Carolina. By 1963, voter registration campaigns in the South were as integral to the Freedom Movement as desegregation efforts. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[2] protecting and facilitating voter registration despite state barriers became the main effort of the movement. It resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had provisions to enforce the constitutional right to vote for all citizens.

Integration of Mississippi universities, 1956–1965 Beginning in 1956, Clyde Kennard, a black Korean War-veteran, wanted to enroll at Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi) under the G.I. Bill at Hattiesburg. Dr. William David McCain, the college president, used the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, to prevent his enrollment by appealing to local black leaders and the segregationist state political establishment.[91]

The state-funded organization tried to counter the civil rights movement by positively portraying segregationist policies. More significantly, it collected data on activists, harassed them legally, and used economic boycotts against them by threatening their jobs (or causing them to lose their jobs) to try to suppress their work.

Kennard was arrested twice on trumped-up charges, and eventually convicted and sentenced to seven years in the state prison.[92] After three years at hard labor, Kennard was granted parole by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. Journalists had investigated his case and publicized the state's mistreatment of his colon cancer.[92]

McCain's role in Kennard's arrests and convictions is unknown.[93][94][95][96] While trying to prevent Kennard's enrollment, McCain made a speech in Chicago, with his travel sponsored by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. He described the blacks' seeking to desegregate Southern schools as "imports" from the North. (Kennard was a native and resident of Hattiesburg.) McCain said:

We insist that educationally and socially, we maintain a segregated society...In all fairness, I admit that we are not encouraging Negro voting...The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man's hands.[93][95][96]

Note: Mississippi had passed a new constitution in 1890 that effectively disfranchised most blacks by changing electoral and voter registration requirements; although it deprived them of constitutional rights authorized under post-Civil War amendments, it survived U.S. Supreme Court challenges at the time. It was not until after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that most blacks in Mississippi and other southern states gained federal protection to enforce the constitutional right of citizens to vote.

James Meredith walking to class accompanied by U.S. marshals In September 1962, James Meredith won a lawsuit to secure admission to the previously segregated University of Mississippi. He attempted to enter campus on September 20, on September 25, and again on September 26. He was blocked by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, who said, "[N]o school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor." The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Barnett and Lieutenant Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. in contempt, ordering them arrested and fined more than $10,000 for each day they refused to allow Meredith to enroll.[97]

U.S. Army trucks loaded with U.S. Marshals on the University of Mississippi campus Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent in a force of U.S. Marshals. On September 30, 1962, Meredith entered the campus under their escort. Students and other whites began rioting that evening, throwing rocks and firing on the U.S. Marshals guarding Meredith at Lyceum Hall. Two people, including a French journalist, were killed; 28 marshals suffered gunshot wounds, and 160 others were injured. President John F. Kennedy sent regular U.S. Army forces to the campus to quell the riot. Meredith began classes the day after the troops arrived.[98]

Kennard and other activists continued to work on public university desegregation. In 1965 Raylawni Branch and Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong became the first African-American students to attend the University of Southern Mississippi. By that time, McCain helped ensure they had a peaceful entry.[99] In 2006, Judge Robert Helfrich ruled that Kennard was factually innocent of all charges for which he was convicted of in the 1950s.[92]

Albany Movement, 1961–62

Movements, politics, and white reactions Grassroots leadership

Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (and other Mississippi-based organizations) is an example of local grassroots leadership in the movement. While most popular representations of the movement are centered on the leadership and philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to one person, organization, or strategy. Sociologist Doug McAdam has stated that "in King's case, it would be inaccurate to say that he was the leader of the modern civil rights movement...but more importantly, there was no singular civil rights movement. The movement was, in fact, a coalition of thousands of local efforts nationwide, spanning several decades, hundreds of discrete groups, and all manner of strategies and tactics—legal, illegal, institutional, non-institutional, violent, non-violent. Without discounting King's importance, it would be sheer fiction to call him the leader of what was fundamentally an amorphous, fluid, dispersed movement."[181] Decentralized grassroots leadership has been a major focus of movement scholarship in recent decades through the work of historians John Dittmer, Charles Payne, Barbara Ransby, and others.

Black power (1966–1968)

African-American women in the movement Women often acted as leaders in the civil rights movement and led organizations that contributed to the cause of civil rights. African-American women stepped into the roles that men had previously held. Women were members of the NAACP because they believed it could help them contribute to the cause of civil rights.[218] Mildred Bond Roxborough who became active in the Civil Rights Movement at the age of nine, when she sold subscriptions to the NAACP The Crisis magazine. She would travel with Thurgood Marshall working alongside him during the time leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka with Thurgood Marshall. Ms. Roxborough would hold many positions within the NAACP many of which would be director positions over a variety of departments. Leading a program from the ground up which would be the largest African American talent-based scholarship program in the country. 600 ACT-SO units across the country which are actively engaged in the recruitment of talented youth.

Women involved with the Black Panthers would lead meetings, edit the Black Panther newspaper, and advocated for childcare and sexual freedom.[219] Women involved with SNCC helped to organize sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, as well as keeping the organization together.[220] Women also formed church groups, bridge clubs, and professional organizations, such as the National Council of Negro Women, to help achieve freedom for themselves and their race.[219] Some women who participated in these organizations lost their jobs because of their involvement.[219]

Discrimination Many women in the movement experienced gender discrimination and sexual harassment within the movement.[221] In the SCLC, Ella Baker's input was discouraged in spite of her being the oldest and most experienced person on the staff. Within the ministers' patriarchal hierarchy, age and experience were actually considered detriments for a woman. Her role as an executive was only assigned as a placeholder for a male leader.[222] Women that worked under SNCC did the clerical work and were not consistently given leadership positions. Women who worked in multiple civil rights organizations noted that males tended to become the leaders and women "faded into the background" and the men of the movement did not acknowledge the gender discrimination present in the organization.[223] Much of the reasoning for the lesser role that women took in the movement was that it was time for black men to take on a role as a leader now that they had the opportunity. Women got very little recognition for their roles in the civil rights movement despite the fact that they were heavily involved with participation and planning.[224]

Fort Deposit, Alabama The events of August 1965 in Fort Deposit, Alabama could be one of the allowable forgettable moments in history. Jonathan M. Daniels, shortly after being released from Hayneville county jail along with 22 others who were arrested for participating in a voter rights demonstration in Fort Deposit, Alabama. Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest, and Daniels accompanied two black teenagers, Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales, Would decide to go to a store near the jail to buy soda for the group. Tom Coleman a construction worker, and part-time deputy sheriff would meet the group on the steps of the store with a shotgun. Tom Coleman aimed the shotgun at Ruby Sale who was in the front of the group, Jonathan M. Daniels pushed Ruby out of the line of fire and was killed by the shotgun blast. Ruby Sales at the age of seventeen, would testify at Tom Colman's trial in which he would be acquitted of the charges against him.

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Civil rights movement https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/article_finder

I would adjust the article to include all of the civil rights movement during the time from the early 19th century and into the 20th. The article makes it seem like it was only in 1960 or so when the movement was happening.

"Before the American Civil War, almost four million blacks were enslaved in the South, only white men of property could vote, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only. But some free states of the North extended the franchise and other rights of citizenship to African Americans. Following the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were passed, including the 13th Amendment (1865) that ended slavery; the 14th Amendment (1868) that gave African-Americans citizenship, adding their total population of four million to the official population of southern states for Congressional apportionment; and the 15th Amendment (1870) that gave African-American males the right to vote (only males could vote in the U.S. at the time). From 1865 to 1877, the United States underwent a turbulent Reconstruction Era trying to establish free labor and civil rights of freedmen in the South after the end of slavery. Many whites resisted the social changes, leading to insurgent movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, whose members attacked black and white Republicans to maintain white supremacy. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant, the U.S. Army, and U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, initiated a campaign to repress the KKK under the Enforcement Acts. Some states were reluctant to enforce the federal measures of the act. In addition, by the early 1870s, other white supremacist and insurgent paramilitary groups arose that violently opposed African-American legal equality and suffrage, intimidating and suppressing black voters, and assassinating Republican officeholders. However, if the states failed to implement the acts, the laws allowed the Federal Government to get involved. Many Republican governors were afraid of sending black militia troops to fight the Klan for fear of war.

After the disputed election of 1876 resulted in the end of Reconstruction and federal troops were withdrawn, whites in the South regained political control of the region's state legislatures. They continued to intimidate and violently attack blacks before and during elections to suppress their voting, but the last African Americans were elected to Congress from the South before disenfranchisement of blacks by states throughout the region, as described below.

The mob-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909

From 1890 to 1908, southern states passed new constitutions and laws to disenfranchise African Americans and many poor whites by creating barriers to voter registration; voting rolls were dramatically reduced as blacks and poor whites were forced out of electoral politics. After the landmark Supreme Court case of Smith v. Allwright (1944), which prohibited white primaries, progress was made in increasing black political participation in the Rim South and Acadiana – although almost entirely in urban areas and a few rural localities where most blacks worked outside plantations. The status quo ante of excluding African Americans from the political system lasted in the remainder of the South, especially North Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s to provide federal enforcement of constitutional voting rights. For more than sixty years, blacks in the South were essentially excluded from politics, unable to elect anyone to represent their interests in Congress or local government. Since they could not vote, they could not serve on local juries."

Internment of Japanese Americans

I would add to this the fact that the economic growth of the Japanese revealed the Anglo population despite the cultural climate at the time. “As the Japanese-American population continued to grow, European Americans on the West Coast resisted the new group, fearing competition and exaggerating the idea of hordes of Asians keen to take over white-owned farmland and businesses. Groups such as the Asiatic Exclusion League, the California Joint Immigration Committee, and the Native Sons of the Golden West organized in response to this "Yellow Peril."

I would add the efforts of groups who helped the interned Japanese Americans, and also add more about the requirements that had to be established for a japanese american to leave the camp or stay in the country. I would improve the over all flow of the article.

American nationalism

I would like to Update and add to the following sections Nationalism in the contemporary United States, Varieties of American Nationalism and Trump presidency. Adding a more objective view showing both the pros and cons of American Nationalism. Using more up to date research and social comparisons as references and examples.