Question

What role did “ordinary” or local people play in the civil rights movement?

Answer 1

Ordinary people played a HUGE part in the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks was just an average woman who had worked all day, and didn't what to have to change her seat on the bus. Her arrest began the Montgomery bus boycott.

Dr. King realized early that if people were going to have to be arrested in order to draw attention; he knew that adults (people who had rent to pay, children dependent on them) could not afford to go to jail for any length of time. He decided on a strategy that leaned heavily on high school and college students.

Using his philosophy of non-violence he directed the students to start breaking "Jim Crow" laws and getting arrested for doing it. So many students got themselves arrested that they overloaded the jails and caused a break down of the legal system in Birmingham.

College students from all over the United States drove or rode buses into the South to support Dr. King and the civil rights movement. Three of them, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Swarner were murdered by the KKK in Mississippi for trying to help black people register to vote.

These were some of the average, ordinary people who fought for civil rights.