How To Write An Essay On Civil Rights
Few scenarios are as daunting for students than facing a blank piece of paper when they know it has to be filled with an essay for a school assignment. Writing from scratch is a significant challenge for many students. But there's no reason to fear it - a little structure and a few tips will go a long way in facilitating your task so much that you could even start to enjoy your writing process.
One of the things that make
essay writing so intimidating is that it seems too open a field, too many possibilities, so the simple decision of where to start becomes itself a difficult one. Well, there is a useful and straightforward strategy to start. Just start at the beginning, with your essay's structure. The structure is your friend on this, as it will provide you with a path to follow and you will no longer feel lost in the wilderness. Your essay on the Civil Rights movement (or on any other subject, for that matter) must include three sections: introduction, body and development and conclusions.
The Introduction
Since your topic is going to be civil rights, it's natural (even necessary) that you will talk about its history and most memorable moments and main characters. That is the kind of information that fits into the body of the essay. This subject is about the concrete and abstract events and customs that brought forth the discrimination of people of particular skin color, the fight against discrimination, the struggle for equal rights. Its final developments allowed the cause to triumph over the established institutional segregation, thus giving remedy to the unfairness trespassing upon everybody's' most elemental human rights.
At the start of your essay, you will present your topic to your readers. In the introduction's final sentences you will state your essay's thesis. To state your thesis means to let your readers what is the subject you're about to develop and how you are going to approach it in the rest of your text. Here's an example of
an introduction to an essay on this subject.
Civil Rights and the American experience
The American struggle for civil rights is discussed very frequently even today with particular emphasis on the things the activists did during the 1960s to ensure the equality of rights and opportunities that the black population was lacking compared to their white colleagues. Names that always come up in this discussion are such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. The activist leaders who affected progress by civil disobedience and boycotts. They made sure that the civil rights struggle went all the way to achieve equality before the law for African Americans as well as opportunities comparable to those of their white peers in the economic realm. The high point in the American Civil Rights struggle came on March 1963 as the march called "Jobs and Freedom" arrived in Washington D. C. promoting equality in rights and job chances. At the time, employment rates were one of the most egregious signs of inequality. Two white men held a job for every black man. That meant that the unemployment rate for blacks was 10% while it was 5% for whites. So, there is a side to the Civil Rights achievements that people often ignore: it boosted the economy and brought into the labor force a massive amount of people that had been ignored previously. This shows us that fighting evils such as discrimination, racism, and segregation can help everybody by pushing the economy forward.
The body
In the body, you will make a case for the topic you previously declared as your aim in the introduction. Give a significant explanation, use evidence that is relevant to the facts and your point, use vivid examples to illustrate your point. Ever point you make will have a paragraph of its own and you will join them through the common thread of ideas that will run along your whole essay because each will be connected to the main idea.